


"A hiding place where no one ever goes"

by manatee_patronus



Category: Dexter (TV), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Ring (2002)
Genre: A Hexter fic, F/M, Featuring music by:, Harry's POV, M/M, Mystery, Or Hextering if you will, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-Season 2 in Dexter, Repressed Memories, There will probably be some kink, clues from beyond the grave, simon and garfunkel, the shins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2018-10-02 14:36:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 50,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10220411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manatee_patronus/pseuds/manatee_patronus
Summary: Harry, Ron, and Hermione head to Miami as representatives of an international Auror task force when the daughter of a prominent political witch is murdered in what seem to be supernatural circumstances. They investigate the crime scene with the help of Dexter, Debra, Vince, and Angel of the Miami Metro Police Department, though the deeper they delve into the case, the more questions they all have. Meanwhile, newly-single Harry has his eye on strong, brooding Dexter...In the end, Harry and Dexter's increasing closeness and their reflection on the dark memories that they share help them to uncover the shocking reality surrounding the murder.





	1. The Crime Scene

"Does any of this remind you two of anything, or is it just me?" Harry asked. For some mysterious reason, the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up - usually that indicated the presence of dark magic or protective enchantments, but his gut told him that this was something else...something darker.

 

"Not just you, mate," said Ron. "The blood, the water on the floor...feels just like second year again, doesn't it? All we're missing is a message from the heir of Slytherin on the wall."

 

"Except that time, the water on the floor was from Moaning Myrtle throwing a tantrum and was completely circumstantial. And also, in that case, Mrs. Norris didn't die." said Hermione.

 

"But she could've," Ron countered. "Only the reflection saved her. This person might not have been so lucky."

 

"This wasn't a basilisk," Hermione said flatly.

 

Harry said nothing, but he agreed with her. Even though the scene before him brought back memories, it still felt off. Almost like someone had staged it and was watching the drama of his reactions from somewhere unseen. He looked around quickly, but saw nothing behind him but the impassive black screen of the television in the corner of the living room, reflecting his tense face. 

 

Everything about the scene they now surveyed felt cruelly ironic. Outside, palm trees swayed peacefully, basking in the hot Miami sunshine. Inside, a young girl had been murdered in what appeared to be brutal circumstances. The glass-topped coffee table was on its side, glass shattered on the floor. Water pooled on the wood floor and bloody splotches trailed on the floor from the fallen glass until a point halfway down the bungalow's long, carpeted hallway. However, that's not where Harry, Ron, and Hermione had found the body. 

 

They stood now in the kitchen, looking into the open door of the walk-in pantry. Kathy Merona was in there, seated on the floor with her legs straight out in front of her. Her hands were neatly clasped in her lap. A white kitchen towel draped over the top of her head and covered her face, but the tips of her curly, brown hair were partially visible over her shoulders. The sight of her made Harry feel desperately sad in a way which defied explanation...it was something about her clasped hands and her legs, perfectly straight, her feet tipped slightly apart, like a doll posed on the floor by a child...

 

It had taken Harry, Ron, and Hermione a good 20 minutes to find her. The Muggle who had reported the murder had not seen the body - merely the blood on the floor. She had been a work friend of Kathy's, stopping by the house to check on her since she had not shown up to work the day before or answered her texts. 

 

A watchwizard stationed in the Miami police department had tipped off the International Task Force for Magical Acts of Terror (InTaForMAT) immediately after Kathy's friend reported the blood on the floor. That was how Harry, Ron, and Hermione had gotten involved. 

 

After three years of serving as Aurors with the Ministry, they had all been promoted to InTaForMAT by the International Confederation of Wizards. Harry liked the work. It was exciting - he apparated to a new country every day. Normally InTaForMAT investigated politically-motivated crimes - assassinations or acts of terrorism - since the local magical authorities were usually able to handle other incidents without any bias or conflicts of interest. 

 

Indeed, they were here in Miami today due to the suspicion that the attack of Kathy Merona might have been politically motivated: her mother, Jill Merona, was a sitting member of the International Confederation of Wizards.

 

"Well," Ron said uncomfortably. "Should we go ahead and do the spell? Just to be sure?"

 

Hermione nodded, biting her lip. "Verita Mori," she said, brandishing her wand.

 

For a moment, a black cloud of smoke seemed to pour from the body's pores, first covering the head and then the rest of the body. Within another moment, the odorless smoke had evaporated, leaving all three friends heavy-hearted, twice as aware of the dead silence in the house as before. 

 

They could have found out the same thing from touching the body, searching for a pulse in the wrist as Muggles did, but the spell told them what they needed to know without corrupting any evidence: Kathy Merona was dead.


	2. A Story Told by Blood and Glass

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next thing Ron, Hermione, and Harry heard was a woman's loud voice as the front door clicked open. 

 

"...can see her fucking flat-screen TV right through the window. Maybe a little discretion would have saved her."

 

The speaker was a tall, thin woman with soft brown hair that hung around her face, dark eyes, and a mouth that looked as tough as it sounded. Three men came through the door after her: a short, bald man of Asian descent with glasses who looked at her butt as he followed her; a stout Latino man who wore a dark-green hat with a brim; and a tan, Caucasian man with curly brown hair and eyes so intense that they looked like they could melt steel. Harry felt a little plunge in his stomach as he looked at this man; something about him - the way he seemed both reserved and strong - attracted him irresistibly. The man's serious eyes flickered over and latched onto his, and he turned away, his face hot. _Focus on the case,_  he told himself.

 

"Muggle police," Hermione murmured to Ron. 

 

The loud woman noticed them first. She held up her badge as she strode toward the kitchen. "Miami PD. Can I ask what the hell you think you're doing in the middle of a crime scene?"

 

"Hello," Hermione said politely. "We're on the International Task Force for Acts of Terrorism." 

 

Harry noticed her wand move behind her back and a moment later she was producing a badge that she had just created from thin air. The other woman examined it, frowning. 

 

"Terrorism," she said slowly. "How is this terrorism?"

 

"We think it's politically-motivated," Harry supplied. "The victim is the daughter of a politician who sits on an international council."

 

"Really?" the woman said, now with great interest and enthusiasm. "Which council?" 

 

Harry froze, darting a side-glance at Ron, but Hermione came to the rescue. "It's one of the subsidiary law-making bodies of the UN."

 

"We'll have to look into that more, Angel," the woman said. The Latino man was already taking notes on a small pad. "We didn't even know that we were dealing with someone so high-profile." The Caucasian man wandered away from the group, examining the bloodstains on the living room floor beside the broken glass. 

 

The woman turned back to Harry, Ron, and Hermione with a look of resignation on her face. "So are you all taking over the case, then, or what's the deal?"

 

"Oh! No, not at all," Hermione said. "I think it'd be great if we could work together and bounce ideas off of each other."

 

Harry and Ron exchanged looks again. Working with local Muggle authorities was a complication that they usually tried to avoid, but sometimes it worked out well. Harry still remembered a mission in Paris when a cemetery gatekeeper from Montparnasse had helped them crack a case and find the whereabouts of the perpetrators involved in a series of explosions that had taken many lives. Hermione's ability to speak French had worked to their advantage. 

 

Without any leads, they had set up interviews with potential witnesses, and the gatekeeper was one who came forward with a lead about seeing the same group of men seemingly disappear into one of the tall, ornamental headstones of the Montparnasse cemetery. It was the size of a large wardrobe and had an ornamental gate that theoretically could permit entry to the closet-sized space within the headstone. The gatekeeper had told them that the police had laughed him out of their sight when he had told them what he had seen, but as soon as Harry, Ron, and Hermione approached the headstone that midnight, they detected traces of protective magic. Once they breached the headstone's defenses, they found an underground room that the terrorists were using as a bunker. They had caught the perpetrators sleeping and were easily able to disarm and arrest them. 

 

The Latino and Asian officer, like Ron and Harry, seemed to be weighing the pros and cons of a combined working arrangement, but the woman answered for them, surprising everyone with her enthusiasm, "I think that sounds great. Let's get acquainted real quick and then we can get to work. I'm Debra Morgan, and that's my brother Dexter over there. He's a blood spatter expert,"

 

The Caucasian man looked up briefly from the broken glass and blood and raised a hand. "Hi," he said with a small smile.

 

"This is Sergeant Angel Batista," Debra gestured toward the Latino man with the hat. 

 

"Pleasure to meet all of you," he said kindly, shaking each of their hands in turn.

 

"And this is Vince Masuka."

 

"You're not going to introduce me by my title, Morgan?" the Asian man protested. "I was the LFI, you know. The Lead Forensics Investigator."

 

"Yes we know that, Vince, and now you're just the lead fucking pervert or something," Debra said. "But he also does great forensics analysis," she added grudgingly to Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Vince looked both amused and satisfied.

 

Now Hermione took the lead in introducing the three of them. "I'm Hermione Granger,"

 

"And I'm Ron Weasley,"

 

"And I'm Harry Potter."

 

The four members of the Miami PD all nodded appreciatively and murmured that it was nice to meet them. Ron grinned at Harry and Harry knew exactly what he was thinking: whenever they worked with Muggles, it was weird (but preferable for Harry) that they didn't scan his hairline for his scar as his magical counterparts always did when they met him for the first time. 

 

"Y'all from Britain?" Debra asked. 

 

"Yes," said Ron.

 

"Know anyone named Lila?"

 

Harry, Hermione, and Ron exchanged uncomprehending looks, and Harry caught Dexter rolling his eyes as he straightened up from bending over the broken glass. Debra smirked over at him but looked satisfied that they had never heard of the unknown Lila. 

 

"Just checking," she said lightly, more to Dexter than to them. Dexter said nothing, and Harry concluded that Lila must be a former partner of Dexter's that Debra didn't approve of.

 

"All right, Dex, what does the blood tell us?" Batista asked.

 

"The victim was standing here before the killer began pursuit," Dexter stood with his back to them, between the shards of the coffee table and the television. "Then something startled her - maybe that was when the killer made their appearance. But anyway, she fell over this table, probably stepping backwards."

 

"Do you think the victim fought with the attacker and that both fell on the table?" Masuka asked eagerly, snapping some photos of the table. 

 

Dexter smiled grimly. "I don't think we're going to find our killer's blood there. The pattern of the shards on the floor and the blood show the impact of one body, and the movements of one pair of hands as she struggled to get to her feet again." Dexter made a sweeping gesture across a mostly-bare spot in the middle of the mess of glass, where the victim had likely fallen over the table. Then he repeated the outward sweeping gesture with both hands and Harry saw how the glass shards radiated outward from the bloody marks like snow angel indentations...the victim had crawled on the floor, her bloody hands slipping and spreading the glass outward in arcs. Harry appreciated how the victim's last moments were now coming together for him...

 

"Where'd this water come from?" Dexter asked suddenly, looking over at Harry, Hermione, and Ron.

 

Ron shrugged. "Part of the crime scene, I guess." 

 

"Weird," Dexter said, and strode carefully around the water and blood until he reached the threshold of the hallway. He leaned forward and squinted toward the place where the blood ended halfway down the hallway. "Of course, the carpet is dry now, but it was probably wet at the time of the murder too. I would guess that the actual moment of death happened there," he pointed down the hallway, "but then she was moved to..." he looked questioningly at Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

 

"The pantry," Hermione finished, gesturing toward the door for Dexter's benefit. He and the others joined their group around the door of the pantry.

 

"Oh yeah, see her hands?" Masuka said.

 

Harry winced. He could see shards of glass protruding from her palms despite the fact that they were loosely clasped together.

 

"Did she have that cloth over her head when you found her?" Batista asked.

 

Harry, Ron, and Hermione nodded. Batista pulled on a pair of gloves and entered the pantry cautiously. He took out a plastic ziplock bag and held it in one hand as he reached toward the body with the other. Masuka stood on his tiptoes to try to see around Batista's back, but the pantry was too narrow and Batista was too broad.

 

As he started to straighten up, he bleated, "Shit!" He backed up rapidly, overbalanced, and fell into the kitchen. Debra gasped and bent quickly to help him back to his feet. It was easy to see what had given him the fright.

 

"Jesus," Masuka said.

 

The face of the corpse was horrifying. The skin was discolored and peeling, a greenish color. The whole skull was more emaciated than a normal head, which made the brown curls floating down to the shoulders look unreal. Worst of all, the face was twisted in what seemed so clearly to be a scream of terror. The eyes were bulging and the jaw seemed to be dislocated, so wide was the gaping mouth.

 

"When was this called in?" Batista said faintly, looking away from the pantry. 

 

"This morning," Harry said tersely. Ron had followed Hermione a few steps away and was clasping her by the elbow and rubbing the small of her back. 

 

"So we think she died yesterday?" Batista said.

 

"That's what the color and consistency of the blood tells us," Dexter said, gesturing back toward the stains in the living room. 

 

Batista frowned at him, not with dislike, but puzzlement. "Impossible," he said. "Look at her face. That's weeks of rotting in water or at least a very humid space."

 

"The friend who reported the crime scene testified that Kathy was at work two days ago," Hermione supplied, still a few feet away. "And the bank backed that up with timesheets."

 

"Think it might have been torture?" Masuka muttered quietly to Batista, who shook his head and shrugged.

 

"No clue," he said, "We'll have to get an autopsy on her. Find a cause of death."

 

A throat cleared. Everyone looked around and saw Hermione walking timidly over to the pantry. "I can get an early read on that," she volunteered. "I guarantee that it will be confirmed by your autopsy."

 

Batista looked dubious and also concerned, but he stepped aside to allow her to enter the pantry. Hermione knelt next to the body, and even though nobody could see what she was doing, Harry knew that she must be running her wand over the body's head and heart, gathering information from her own forensics spells.

 

Soon she was backing carefully out of the pantry, her face pinched in disgust. "Interesting find," she said.

 

A rumbling sound interrupted her. They all looked around, confused, until they saw Masuka's guilty face.

 

"I vote," he said, "that we continue our comparison of notes over dinner. Let's rope off the crime scene and go to Mi Pueblo."

 

There were some protests from Deb and Batista, who wanted more authentic food, but Mi Pueblo ultimately won out due to its proximity to the house. Though Harry and Ron tried to question her with looks, Hermione remained silent on what she had found out until they arrived at the restaurant.


	3. Questions Begin Where the Heart Stops

Soon, Harry, Hermione, Ron, Batista, Vince, Dex, and Debra were all seated in a round booth at Mi Pueblo, sharing a bowl of cheese dip and speculating more about the murder.

 

"So why the water?" Debra was asking, crunching on a chip at the same time.

 

"Maybe she spilled it," Batista suggested. He grimaced. "Maybe she urinated."

 

Deb shook her head. "Too much for that. Also we would have smelled it. But you give me an idea. It would be good to find out where that water came from - whether it was tap or bottled, fresh or salt, whether there were any minerals in it - whatever you can find out about it."

 

Vince nodded, then turned to Hermione. "So what did your initial forensics scan tell you?" he asked her.

 

Just then, the waitress arrived with their food. They each thanked her for the food, she smiled with a gleam of her teeth, and then took up some empty glasses from the table beside theirs. Debra was already halfway through her Grande Burrito by the time everyone else started eating.

 

"What?" she said roughly with her mouth full. "I was fucking hungry." 

 

Ron laughed. "So?" Masuka prompted Hermione again, eagerly.

 

Hermione shook her head with bewilderment. "It's the first time I've gotten conflicting reports," she said. "The cause of death was cardiac arrest-"

 

Everyone interrupted her, because that was bizarre enough by itself.

 

"Cardiac arrest?" Batista repeated.

 

"How old was she?" Masuka spluttered as he choked on a chip.

 

Dexter beat him on the back. "24 years old," he said. "And she was in good shape." 

 

Batista looked troubled. "What does that even imply? Cardiac arrest...This was a victim who was pursued by an assailant. There was some sort of struggle. How did her heart just stop during that fight?"

 

"And the face," Hermione continued, "did bear clear signs of weeks of rotting in water. Which, as we already said, was impossible, because now I have an exact time of death."

 

"What is it?" they all asked.

 

"9:00 pm yesterday evening." she said. 

 

"How were you able to find these things out?" Masuka asked, filled with awe. 

 

Hermione looked a little flustered by the compliment. "Well, years of forensics training, you know." 

 

"Still. Damn." Masuka said. 

 

"All right," Batista said, business-like once more. "Thank you, Hermione, that definitely answers some of our questions in the short run. We'll still get an autopsy just in case, but I'm fully confident that the information is going to match up. In the meantime, we want to get in touch with the work friend who reported the crime scene this morning, and also probably with the hot-shot mom, to see if she knows why someone would go after her daughter."

 

"We can tackle that," Harry said hastily. "We can get in touch with her tomorrow while you all handle the crime scene witness, and then we can get together and compare notes again."

 

"Good idea, Harry," said Batista. "Divide and conquer."

 

"Y'all are forgetting another question that'll help us determine identity," Debra said, now scarfing down the flan that had just arrived.

 

"What's that?" Ron asked.

 

"Why did the killer move the body?"

 

Everyone looked straight ahead, at a loss for answers. 

 

Dexter blurted, "They're telling us something."

 

"What?" said Deb urgently.

 

He shook his head, his eyes wide with puzzlement. "I don't know yet."


	4. A Dream of an Unknown Woman

After dinner was finished, Harry, Ron, and Hermione parted ways with Miami PD and headed back to their hotel. They were on the fourth floor, with a nice balcony view of the city, which was now lit with neon lights and crawling with night life.

 

Hermione took her pajamas into the bathroom, showered, and changed while Ron and Harry changed in the main part of the hotel room. Then Harry climbed into the bed nearest the window and Ron and Hermione took the bed by the bathroom. Ron flipped through some of the local TV stations for a while, but Harry was exhausted; he fell asleep within minutes.

 

He had a strange dream. It was strange for a few reasons: first, because he usually only ever dreamt of people he knew in real life; and second, because it felt so sharp and vivid, unlike his normal dreams, of which he usually only recalled fuzzy details when he awoke.

 

He was sitting in the Dursleys’ kitchen, and he could tell that he was younger because of how the top of the table came up to his chest. Standing by the sink was Aunt Petunia, glowering at him as usual, her pinched face a clear portrait of dislike. However, as Harry watched, her features softened and changed, and her dark hair grew lighter and apple-colored…

 

It was his mother! She stood by the sink, beaming at him, and she opened her arms. Harry stood up, overjoyed to see her, but then her features changed again – her hair grew darker, her chin narrower, her eyes colder.

 

Horrified, Harry took a step back, intending to sit back down in the chair, but the chair and table were no longer there. In fact, the whole room had subtly transformed, almost without his noticing. Now he stood in a room with dark bookcases and trophies, facing an opening into a hall, where an oval mirror hung. The transformed woman stood beside the mirror, her upper torso and face turned toward him as though she had just noticed him approaching from behind. Despite the coldness of her eyes and an air of melancholy that clung to her, she smiled at Harry just as his mother had. Instead of reassuring him, however, it only unsettled him more. Why was this strange woman looking at him like that?

 

She took a step toward him, the room shifted, and then Harry was back in the kitchen with Aunt Petunia. She turned into his mother again, who still held out her arms, waiting for him to embrace her. This time, Harry hesitated, afraid she would turn into the strange woman. And sure enough, after another minute, the last transformation occurred, and Harry found himself in the strange house with the strange woman – now fully facing him and a few steps closer than she was before. He tried to lift his feet to turn away from her and flee, but he found that he was paralyzed.

 

The cycle of the dream repeated itself several times, with the strange woman moving closer to him each time. Finally, she stood beside him, so close that he could count the bobby pins in her thin, black hair. He wanted to cry out, to run away, but he was as still as though someone had cast Petrificus Totalus on him. The woman was taking something dark from behind her back that he could just barely discern from his peripheral vision.

 

“Rise and shine! We’ve got to go meet with the victim’s mother today.”

 

Ron’s voice jerked Harry immediately out of his nightmare. He found that one of his legs was twisted in the blankets and the other was dangling off the bed. He was also covered in sweat.

 

He looked through the hanging blinds and saw that the rosy rising sun had just kissed the tops of the buildings.

 

“I had the weirdest dream last night,” he said, putting on his glasses. He didn’t know if he was imagining it, but his scar felt vaguely prickly, just as it once did whenever he dreamt of Voldemort.

 

“Tell me about it.” Ron was already dressed, standing in front of the mirror and struggling with his tie. “I had some mental dream about horses screaming. It’s probably that guacamole we ate last night.”

 

Somehow, Harry doubted that guacamole had caused his dream, but he didn’t say more about it. Hermione came out of the bathroom, looking very pretty in a blue sundress. Just as Ron gave up on tying the tie and was reaching for his wand to do it, Hermione stepped behind him, reached her arms around his neck, and finished the loop for him. As she did it, Ron looked at her reflection in the mirror, clearly admiring her outfit.

 

“You’ve got to learn how to do this Muggle stuff, Ron, especially if we keep working with Miami PD.”

 

“But I like when you do it,” Ron protested. “Isn’t that a flirty thing Muggles do sometimes? In movies and stuff?”

 

Hermione tried not to smile. She’d been making Ron watch a lot of movies lately, trying to get him more acclimated to the customs of the Muggle world. “Well, yes, sometimes, but –“

 

“Well there you go,” Ron said triumphantly, sticking his fingers in the loop to loosen the tie a little.

 

“We’ll just pretend that we’re so in love that we can’t keep our hands off each other. Oh wait,” Ron seized her around the waist and pulled her onto the bed so that they both toppled on their sides. As he held her against him with one arm, he tickled her hip with the other hand, causing her legs to wiggle in the air as she laughed and tried to straighten up. “We don’t have to pretend!"

 

“Ron, don’t be an ass, Harry’s here, too – remember?!”

 

Ron let her go and said, “Oops, sorry, Harry,” without real conviction.

 

Despite her scolding of Ron, Hermione kissed his forehead and then the side of his neck beneath his jaw, causing him to giggle, before pushing herself back to her feet. “All right, team,” she said brightly, “Let’s head out.”


	5. What Harry Wants

Because they wanted to keep a low profile, Harry, Ron, and Hermione arrived at Jill Merona's house by means of strictly non-magical travel. Ron grumbled about this at first, until Hermione Transformed an orange they found in the parking lot into a slim, sporty car and allowed him to customize it to his liking. Then Hermione drove them across town because Ron was a terrible driver and Harry did not want to drive in Miami traffic.

 

Harry sat in the backseat behind Ron, looking out his window at the office buildings, shabby corner restaurants, and at the hot glaze that the sun seemed to apply to everything. He mulled over his dream from the night before. He couldn't shake the conviction that the unknown woman in the dream was _important_ somehow, that she had something to do with the case he was investigating. He knew that he had never seen her before, but she still felt _real_ to him...Somewhere, she was standing in that dark house in front of the mirror, putting pins in her hair. He was certain that the room of bookshelves and trophies that he had stood in was also real.

 

Suddenly something Ron had said that morning came back to him. "...I had some mental dream about horses screaming..." Harry clearly recalled that one of the gleaming statuettes or trophies on a bookshelf had been horse-shaped. Were their dreams connected somehow? 

 

Harry was just about to ask Ron more about his dream when Hermione broke the silence. "So have you talked to Ginny lately, Harry?"

 

Harry noticed that Ron turned his face away, toward the window, and that his ears turned red as they always did when he was embarrassed. Harry suppressed a sigh with difficulty. He wasn't hurting anymore, but he was definitely tired of talking about it.

 

"No, Hermione. It's like I told you, I'm happier now. The relationship wasn't going great and the whole situation - when it went down - just gave us an opportunity to step back and think about what we really wanted."

 

"Ginny wants _you_ ," Hermione said, a little fiercely. 

 

"I wasn't enough for Ginny," Harry replied calmly. "And don't you say that I'm being condescending or taking a self-righteous tone about this," he pointed toward the driver's seat, heading Hermione off before she could begin laying into him. "I honestly want the best for her, and I don't think I can give her that."

 

The situation that they were skirting around, which had been the cause of Harry and Ginny's breakup, was Ginny's affair with Dean Thomas that had happened while Ginny was away for business a few months previously. Harry had found out about it by accidentally opening an owl post letter that he thought had been for him, but had actually been a note from Dean to Ginny, outlining the details of their next tryst. At the time, Harry had felt a little hurt about it, but it also felt like the inevitable conclusion of things. 

 

Their sex life had fallen off. Harry gradually lost his creativity in bed and he simply couldn't get hard anymore. He was finding himself increasingly drawn to men and, more specifically, to fantasies of being loved by an older, stronger man. These fantasies had led to a period of morose self-reflection. He started to wonder if his fantasies were coming from his yearning for a father figure in his life, a yearning which had always been thwarted by fate - the death of his father, the death of Sirius and Lupin, the death of Dumbledore...Because of his suspicion that his fantasies came from a void in his life, he felt that they were something wrong with him. It depressed him as he tried to repress it, and it negatively impacted his lovemaking with Ginny.

 

He could tell that his lack of passion hurt Ginny. In a way, finding the letter was a relief because he was then able to tell Ginny that she could pursue whoever fulfilled her and made her happy. She hadn't wanted him to leave, but he insisted, and the only thing that upset him about the whole thing was the fact that he felt so _relieved_ and _happy_ to leave. What was wrong with him?

 

"What do _you_ want?" Hermione asked as they turned into a residential neighborhood with cream-colored houses and palm trees waving in the front yards.

 

Harry hesitated, trying to determine if he was ready to talk to his friends about his new desires - or whether he ever wanted to. 

 

"I just want to be enough," Harry said. 


	6. The Victim's Mother

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your patience as I continue to write this! What with work, I am usually only able to post once a week, but now that the storyline is accelerating I'll try to do it a bit more often. I'll aim to have a few more chapters out before the end of this upcoming work-week.

Jill Merona's house was on the corner of a quiet suburban street. Unlike the other cottage-style houses along the street, her house was two stories and painted entirely white. With its decorative shutters and the architectural swirls along the edge of the sloped roof, it reminded Harry of a big wedding cake, melting in the Florida sun.

Hermione parked the car on the curb, a few feet away from the mailbox. Ron groaned as they stepped out onto the pavement and made their way along the walking path toward the front door.

"I'm already hungry," he said.

Hermione rolled her eyes. "We can go grab lunch as soon as this is done."

Harry knocked on the door. Through the glazed window panes, he could see the vague figure of a darkly-dressed woman approaching.

Jill Merona opened the door. Her skin was tan and starting to become papery with age. Her brown, tightly-wound curls were her daughter's, except that Jill's contained streaks of gray woven throughout. Her eyes were narrow and she had a charming smile that likely served her well in politics. She flashed that smile at them now - dazzling yet devoid of warmth.

"Hello," she said in a husky, deep voice. Her face was a mask of pleasant curiosity.

"Hello, Ms. Merona," Hermione took the lead, as she always did, in social matters. "This is Harry and Ron, and I'm Hermione, and we're representatives of InTaForMAT. I'm afraid we have some very bad news for you."

Jill Merona's face and stiff posture slackened, and Harry thought he could detect two separate reasons: part of the slackening was the letting-down of her defenses upon hearing that they, too, were wizards; and the second part was her deflation upon hearing of impending bad news.

"Come in, come in," she ushered them inside distractedly in her soft voice, which was like velvet. They followed her through a pale hall, past an opening that led upstairs, and through a yellow-painted kitchen. Here they saw the first signs of a magical household: a pot was washing itself in the sink and a bag of sugar floated from the open door of the pantry toward a bowl where other ingredients were already whisking themselves. Everything in the room was spotless, but Harry noticed that there were some paint scratches on the inside of the pantry door. A pig-tailed girl who looked to be about college age stood in the corner of the room, supervising the whisking and the dish washing with her wand clasped loosely in her hand and a look of intense concentration on her face.

"My daughter, Leah," Jill gestured toward her daughter. Pride shone in her face.

Leah grinned at them. "Hi there," she said. "If you hang around long enough, there'll be cupcakes. Oops." The act of greeting them had broken her concentration: as the bag of sugar tipped toward the bowl, some of it spilled on the floor.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Hermione said, whipping out her wand and moving toward the spill, "Let me help -"

"Go on. Clean it up," Jill said to her daughter, rather more sharply than Harry would have thought necessary. Leah's face turned pink with shame and she bent over the spill with her wand hand shaking nervously. The scene reminded Harry of something, though he couldn't quite think what it was. "Where's your sister?" Jill asked in a softer voice.

Leah straightened up, smiling - the uncomfortable moment had passed. "She's downtown with some of her school friends, getting books for the next semester," she said. "I think they were going to go see a movie, too."

"Great," said Jill, "Then this will all be ready for her by the time she gets home. It's my youngest daughter's birthday," she added to Ron, Hermione, and Harry.

"Oh. Yay," Ron said, clearly uncomfortable. Harry understood how he felt: had this woman not heard about the blood in her daughter's apartment??

"We came to talk to you about Kathy," Hermione said.

Jill's face became an expressionless mask and she nodded curtly. "Come in here," she said quietly. Harry, Ron, and Hermione followed her through the next door and Leah continued making cupcakes.

They entered a sitting room with three couches arranged in a U-shape around a coffee table. On the wall beside the door was an entertainment center with a CD player. As Harry passed by, he noticed that the CD case for Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits was sitting on top of the CD player. Harry, Ron, and Hermione all sat on the same couch while Jill sat on the one adjacent to them.

"Ms. Merona," Hermione said, "Were you made aware yesterday that your daughter, Kathy, was attacked?"

Jill nodded slowly. "The Miami watchwizard forwarded the report to me. That's why I was so relieved when I heard that three of the best wizards from InTaForMAT were going to be investigating the matter personally. Kathy couldn't be in better hands." She smiled at them.

Ron smiled weakly back, but Hermione bowed her head. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, Ms. Merona, but Kathy...is dead."

Very slowly, the smile melted off of Jill's tan, aging face. She looked dumbly back at them. Harry waited for her to speak or cry, but when she did neither of those things, he said, "We know it is probably hard for you to talk about, but we were wondering if you had any insight as to why someone would go after Kathy. Do you think it could have been a political opponent of yours?"

Jill did not immediately answer, but instead asked, "Were there signs of Dark Magic at the crime scene?"

"It is hard to make any conclusions at the present time," Hermione said. "We still know so little and some of what we have encountered is unlike anything we've seen in our other cases. However, I think it is safe to say that no ordinary Muggle could have killed her."

Jill nodded thoughtfully and then turned back to Harry. "I do not know of many political opponents who would go after my daughters instead of myself," she said. "And of all of my daughters...Leah and Molly would be more at risk, given..."

"Given the fact that they live with you?" Hermione asked shrewdly.

Jill nodded. "Not many people know that I have three daughters," she added. But then her mouth twitched toward a grimace, as though she regretted saying that.

"Why doesn't Kathy live with you like your other daughters?" Ron asked, clearly catching her grimace.

Now Jill looked uncomfortable, placing her tongue between her teeth as she pondered how to answer. "Well, you see, Kathy is....well, a Squib," she said. Ron's mouth dropped. Harry did think it strange that this detail about Kathy had not been included in the case file. "She's never been able to do magic, and that's caused some tension between us. She's - she's always been a little jealous, you see. So ultimately she decided to live with her father instead of me. I honestly haven't seen a whole lot of her since then."

"How long ago was that?" Hermione asked.

"Hmm, about 14 years now. She was ten. As I understand it, she got her own house once she graduated from Muggle school." Jill widened her eyes to signify that she was asking for verification.

"Yes, she has her own house," Hermione said. "That was where we found her body. In her kitchen pantry."

Jill nodded slowly.

Harry had an idea. "So you don't think you have any opponents who would attack Kathy because she was a Squib - you know, pureblood fanatic types?

Jill pressed her lips together in a thoughtful expression as she shook her head. "No. No one who would do something like this."

"When was the last time you saw Kathy?" Hermione asked, now making notes on a pad.

"Last year," Jill said. "We got together for lunch. She wanted to talk about how things were when she was growing up. We talked it out a while, but it didn't really change anything. When she left, she said that it was for the best that she had gone to live with her dad," Jill's eyes were far away as she remembered. "And of course, that hurt my feelings a little, but you can't make someone see things from your perspective."

"I see," said Hermione, setting her pen down. "Do you have anything else to tell us? Anything strange you might have seen or heard lately?"

Jill shook her head.

"All right," Ron and Harry followed Hermione's lead in standing up. "Thank you for your help, Ms. Merona, and we are deeply sorry for your loss. We're going to keep investigating and do our best to bring the perpetrator to justice."

Jill smiled a wide political smile, appearing to be back in her element. "Thank you. Thank you for all you are doing. And let me know if there is anything else I can do to help." She led them back through the house and waved goodbye at the door.

The brightness of the sun felt unbearable after the cool pallor of the white house. Ron waited until they had all piled back into the car to say, "Something's bloody weird about that woman."

"Yeah, I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way," Harry said, even laughing a little after all of the pressure in the house. It felt good, like sinking into a hot-tub and feeling his muscles relax.

Hermione didn't laugh, but shook her head as she buckled her seat-belt, started the car, and turned the air conditioning on high. "Having a birthday party the day after hearing that one of your daughters was attacked. 'Bloody weird' is an understatement. I'll be doing more research on Jill Merona. I have a feeling that she's not telling us everything about her relationship with Kathy."

Harry's phone chirped. He pulled it from his pocket and read the text message.

"Hey," he said. "Just got a text from Sergeant Batista. They interviewed Kathy's friend and got the autopsy results today. They want to meet back at the crime scene tonight to do a more thorough search of the house and compare notes again."


	7. Reflections and Sketches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's another chapter!! I'll try to have the next one out this weekend but definitely no later than 3/31...can't miss the 7-day deadline...  
> lol. I crack myself up.

"Your pre-autopsy analysis was spot-on, Hermione," Batista said.

 

He, Masuka, Deb, and Dexter were all gazing at Hermione with a look of veneration. Everyone sat in the living room of Kathy Merona's house, between the back of the couch and the entrance to the kitchen. Dexter had laid out a thick sheet of plastic on the ground for everyone to sit on so that they didn't corrupt any of the evidence on the hardwood floor. It whispered and crackled beneath them, as the slightest movement sent it rustling.

 

Harry felt a little like he was part of a seance or a strange cult, sitting cross-legged as he was on the plastic wrap, facing everyone in a circle. However, he wasn't complaining: some good luck and a bit of subtle maneuvering had placed him in between Hermione and Dexter, and he was now quietly enjoying how good the man smelled - like fresh laundry and a musky aftershave. Harry could feel the warmth from Dexter's body and their knees were almost touching.

 

Harry tried to anchor his thoughts in the present moment, as Hermione was the only one with an excuse for blushing right now after Batista's compliment. 

 

"...time of death was 9:00 pm two nights ago, and our coroner also got conflicting reports of cardiac arrest and drowning," Batista was reading from a piece of paper.

 

"And speaking of the drowning," Masuka added, pulling out a small test tube and showing it to them. "We got a sample from the water on the floor and we're going to conduct more extensive forensic testing on it, so that we can find out why either our victim or assailant was so wet at the time of the attack." He stopped abruptly, then let out a deep, lewd giggle as he realized what he had just said. 

 

Everyone ignored him.

 

"What did Kathy's friend have to say?" Ron asked.

 

Batista looked at a pad of paper and shook his head wearily. "Nothing that we didn't already know," he said. "Allie Lysander. She worked at the bank with Kathy. Said that Kathy was a very devoted employee, which was why she thought it was strange when she didn't show for a few days or answer her texts. Here's one thing we can add: when she came around the house, the front door was ajar. That freaked her out from the start. She took one step inside the house, saw the table and the blood on the floor, and immediately left and called the police. She never saw the body." 

 

"The killer left the door open?" Ron said. "That sounds almost like..."

 

"Like he wanted someone to find his masterpiece?" Debra said. "Yeah. I think we're dealing with an exhibitionist, a fucking twisted exhibitionist."

 

Everyone murmured their agreement. Harry felt a chill and a whisper of fear that raised the hairs on the back of his neck and arms. He whipped his head around. He was sitting near the corner of the couch, so he could see the shattered table and the entertainment center over his shoulder. He knew it was a strange thought, but he felt uneasy turning his back on the television; its silent black screen felt intrusive and judgmental, as though it was haughtily observing their investigation. _But that's stupid,_ Harry thought. _People watch television, television doesn't watch them._

 

"How was the victim's mother?" Deb asked Hermione. 

 

Harry, Ron, and Hermione all exchanged uncomfortable looks. "Well," said Hermione. "I don't know whether it was shock, or something else, but she, well -"

 

"She seemed suspiciously unconcerned that Kathy was dead," Harry supplied. 

 

"She was planning a _birthday party_ for one of her other daughters," Ron added with a look of comic incredulity on his face.

 

Masuka gave a low whistle and Debra looked shocked. "What a cold-hearted cunt," she said.

 

"But apparently she and Kathy were estranged," Hermione said, clearly attempting to evaluate Jill's behavior with impartiality. "So I guess that makes her behavior _slightly_ more understandable...Anyway, I'm still going to look more closely at her background."

 

"Damn right you should," Debra said enthusiastically. "Sounds like she's shaping up to being a pretty likely suspect." 

 

Hermione looked a little dubious about and nauseated by the idea, but said nothing. Harry had his own doubts about Jill being a suspect, but they had nothing to do with his sentimental appraisal of the sanctity of mother-daughter relationships. After seeing Jill Merona's house - meticulously clean and organized - he could not imagine her leaving such a mess in a murder scene. Also, all of the evidence pointed toward a hearty struggle and attempt to flee on Kathy's part: if Jill was right about her being a Squib, then she wouldn't have even had the chance to react if a capable wizard had decided to kill her. In fact, Harry was starting to think that it wasn't a wizard who had pursued Kathy Merona in her last moments...but he felt equally certain that this had not been a garden-variety muggle murder.

 

"You look like shit, Dexter," Masuka said suddenly. 

 

Harry looked around and saw that Dexter's eyes did look a little glassy and his head was lowered as though he were nodding off. However, upon hearing his name, he lifted his head and his eyes brightened. "Thanks, Vince," he said lightly. "Didn't sleep well last night."

 

"I don't think any of us did," Deb said. "After seeing her face."

 

A cold, quiet moment passed between them, before Dexter broke the silence. "I have the blood report here." He showed them a packet of papers that he had been holding in his lap. "As I suspected, the blood samples on the wood floor and in the hallway all belong to the victim. I was not able to find any indication of another person's blood. It looks like our killer got away clean."

 

Debra shook her head. "They all fuck up somehow. And that's why we're back here tonight, to look around for fuck-ups."

 

"Well said, Detective," Batista said, smiling. "Let's get to work. I think we should split up. Debra, Hermione, Vince and I will scour the front part of the house for any clues we may have missed. Dexter, Harry, and Ron," - Harry's heart leapt at hearing his name grouped with Dexter's - "go find the victim's bedroom and look through the rest of the house. If the killer was known to the victim, we might find records, journals, some kind of paper trail that might lead us to the killer." 

 

Everyone murmured their agreement and stood up, slipping and sliding a little on the plastic wrap. Harry, Ron, and Dexter moved into the mouth of the hallway. The blood had dried in brown spatters on the floor. The length and darkness of the hall created an ominous atmosphere that raised the hairs on Harry's arms as he stepped carefully around the bloodstains. 

 

He wanted to make conversation with Dexter, but as he didn't know the man, he had no clue where to start. So he talked to Ron instead.

 

"So what happened in your mad horse dream that you mentioned earlier?" he asked as Ron pushed open the first door on the right. It was a bathroom. The bathtub had a shower curtain patterned with sea life and haughty-faced mermaids. 

 

"We can come back to the bathroom," Dexter said. "Let's find the bedroom first."

 

"Oh, that," said Ron as they continued down the hall. "It didn't last very long. I was high up, in a place I'd never been before, maybe an attic." He squinted as he tried to remember. Dexter opened a door on the left and they saw a linen closet, not even deep enough to step into. 

 

"No! It was like, a loft - a barn loft. And I went to the edge and looked down, and then I had some vertigo so I felt a little sick, but way down below, there were these horses - about 10 of them - and they were going crazy. Screeching and writhing. One had fallen on its back and looked injured and another one was running headfirst into the door of the barn, trying to break out. It was so loud. And I felt so angry. And the weirdest thing was that it felt like my anger was affecting the horses and making them act that way." Ron shook his head slowly. "Mental, like I said. What was yours about again?"

 

"Aunt Petunia and my mum were in it," Harry said. "It was in Aunt Petunia's kitchen, and she changed into my mum, but then my mum and the kitchen changed...Then I was in a dark house with bookshelves and trophies, and there was a woman I didn't know, in front of a mirror, looking back and smiling at me." 

 

Dexter turned and gave Harry a sharp look, not angry or reprimanding, but amazed and full of interest. 

 

Pleased by the attention, Harry stumbled, excused himself, and continued. "She had black hair in a bun and was very pale...and the reason I was wondering about your dream, Ron," he said, "was because the trophies in this room were horse-shaped. Horse-shaped trophies. Maybe she had racing horses or something? I don't know. Anyway, so she kept changing back and forth from Aunt Petunia, to my mom, to this lady" - they entered the last room in the hall, which was clearly the bedroom. Harry felt sad to see the purple flower blankets, which reminded him somehow just how young Kathy had been...barely done with adolescence. Above the bed was a poster of what seemed to be honeycombed coral, with bold letters declaring, "The Shins: Wincing the Night Away." A white writing desk piled with papers sat across from the bed, beside a full length mirror in the corner. To the left of the mirror, a wide window looked out onto the street. 

 

"And all the while, the mystery lady got closer and closer, and then she was right beside me. She was pulling something from behind her." Harry strode to the window, his back to the bed and the closet. Dexter pulled on gloves and slid the closet door open, searching the mess within. Harry could hear Ron rifling through the papers on Kathy's desk. 

 

As he gazed out into the street, Harry wondered if the killer had spied on Kathy through this window before killing her, watching her go to sleep barely-dressed and biding the time until his violent lust could be sated. In his mind, he absently replayed the part of his dream just before he had woken up. He saw a reflective, shiny gleam on a dark surface, almost like the glare of the sun on the window glass, except more fluid, more flexible, more...plastic. "I think she had a garbage bag," he said. "I think that's what she was pulling from behind her." 

 

Suddenly Ron swore. Harry turned around and saw Dexter clambering awkwardly out of the closet, looking toward Ron with concern.

 

"Harry," Ron said faintly. 

 

"What?" Harry said, his heart beating.

 

"The woman in your dream," Ron said. "Did she look anything like this?" He held up a sheet of paper from the desk for them both to see.

 

An exact sketch of Harry's dream woman gazed back at him, standing in the same position in which he had first seen her: facing a mirror, but partly turned toward him. The eerie smile seemed to dance across her cold features even though she was just a pencil sketch. Beneath the sketch, someone (likely Kathy) had written, "Who are you??" 

 

Harry stumbled again, but this time it wasn't from being flustered. And he could tell from the uncharacteristic open-mouthed shock on Dexter's face and from the hand over his heart that the woman meant something to him too. 

 

However, he didn't have a chance to find out what she meant to him, for just in that moment, Debra screamed from the other room, "DEX! HARRY! RON! Get your asses out here now, I fucking _found_ something!"


	8. A Piece of the Killer

Harry, Ron, and Dexter hurried back down the hallway, flattening themselves against the wall to avoid stepping in the dried blood, and joined Batista, Hermione, Debra, and Masuka where they stood grouped around the television in the living room. 

 

"Look at this, Dex," Debra said feverishly, pointing at the black front edge of the entertainment center. Dexter knelt so that it was at eye level. Harry, peering over his shoulder, could see that there was a small, white fragment of something - a little smaller than a pinky nail - stuck on the edge of the entertainment center, something that looked suspiciously like -

 

"Skin," Dexter said. "A much lighter hue than Kathy's skin, which was quite tan. We may have our killer, ladies and gentlemen." 

 

Debra whooped and punched the air as Dexter produced a pair of tweezers and a plastic bag and carefully placed the shred of skin in it. "Strange that there's no blood, though," he murmured. 

 

"Let's see," Masuka said, stepping back toward the wreckage of the table. "Let's try to imagine this. So our victim is standing here when the killer enters and a struggle ensues. Kathy pushes the killer, who stumbles back" - he turned around to mimic the killer, stumbling back toward them, forcing them to scatter - "and scrapes his calf on the sharp edge of the entertainment center." Masuka pointed at the edge from which they had just recovered the skin. "Then the killer straightens up, runs forward, and pushes Kathy, who falls on top of the table." Masuka gestured toward Dexter. "And we know the story from there." 

 

"I think you've got something, Masuka," said Batista, "But let's wait to reconstruct the scene until we extract the DNA from the skin and run it in the system." He turned to address everyone. "All right, team, we've made plenty of progress tonight. It might be time to break for dinner." Addressing Ron, Harry, and Dexter, he said, "Did you all find anything in the rest of the house?" 

 

Ron glanced at Harry, his eyes wide, and opened his mouth. Harry knew that he was about to talk about his dream and the corresponding sketch of the dream woman - he didn't think this was a good idea, since Miami Metro PD had no reason to take his dreams seriously. As Ron looked at him, Harry narrowed his eyes and shook his head almost imperceptibly. From years of practice in communicating non-verbally in tight situations, Ron immediately understood Harry's message.

 

"We found some strange sketches," Ron said, squaring his feet as he always did when trying to be political. "As of yet, it's hard to say whether or not they have anything to do with the murder. We can keep digging."

 

"That's what I like to hear," Batista said. "Since we've got all the fluids from the main crime scene, we can return to the hunt for documents tomorrow. Now, dinner."

 

Everyone murmured appreciatively and quarreled about what restaurant to go to as they filed toward the front door. Harry followed them, but then a warm hand closed gently around his forearm. He turned to find himself face-to-face with Dexter, who spoke to him in an urgent, low voice. "Could you swing by my place tonight? I want to discuss the woman with you." He lowered his voice even more, even approached Harry's ear to whisper, "She was in my dream, too. I have a gut feeling that she means something to this case, and my gut feelings are usually right." 

 

Harry nodded. "Absolutely," he said. "Just give me your address and tell me what time and I'll be there."

 

Dexter smiled. Because his face was so hard, the warmth of the smile dazzled it even more - and made Harry feel lightheaded. He wrote his cell phone number and address down on a piece of paper and handed it over to Harry. "See you around 8:30?" Dexter asked, and when Harry nodded again, he added, "Make sure you bring the sketch with you." 

 


	9. Behind a Veil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's another chapter for you! Hoping to have the next one out before this Sunday.  
> Also, please please please feel free to leave me comments or feedback - I like growing as a writer and finding out what things people like/dislike.

The night was pleasantly cool and a sea breeze ruffled their hair as Harry, Hermione, and Ron got out of the car at their hotel after dinner. Hermione lingered by the car, apparently thinking hard. 

 

"Aren't you coming up?" Ron asked her, jerking his head in the direction of the hotel lobby. 

 

She shook her head. "I'm not feeling very tired. I think I ought to go ahead and investigate Jill Merona while I still have energy." 

 

"Where do you plan on going to investigate at this time of night?" Ron said, laughing but also looking concerned. Harry smiled. It felt just like old times back at Hogwarts when Hermione would scarf down lunch at breakneck speed so that she could hurry off to the library, leaving Ron and himself perpetually mystified. 

 

"Department of Records at the Ministry," Hermione said. "I may even pay a visit to the International Confederation of Wizards' Archive, too."

 

"Well, be careful," Ron said. "Jill Merona might not be happy to hear that we're snooping around her files."

 

"Hence why I want to go now, late at night, when hardly anyone'll be at the Ministry to see me."

 

"Do you want me to come with you?" 

 

Hermione shook her head, smiling as Ron stifled a yawn with his hand. "You're sleepy. Get some rest because I'm sure that we'll have a big day tomorrow, too." 

 

"All right," Ron said, his voice distorted by the end of his yawn. "Least I can do is walk you around to the back of the building where you can Disapparate. Harry," he turned around as he started to walk toward the building, "Want to help me turn on the television upstairs so that we can laugh at Muggle sports together?"

 

"I'll help you with the TV, Ron, but I've got to go out to do some investigating, too."

 

When Ron looked at him questioningly, he added, "Dexter had the same dream as me. I'm going over to his place so that we can talk about what it might mean."

 

"What dream?" Hermione said. 

 

Harry waved his hand. "I'll tell you about it later. You'd better head on over to the Ministry so that you're not exhausted tomorrow."

 

They all walked toward the hotel together, Ron and Hermione branching away from Harry near the entrance to walk through the grass. They turned around the side of the building and disappeared from view. Harry was sure that they would probably do some snogging in the dark before Hermione Disapparated. 

 

Harry entered the brightly-lit lobby. Behind the desk was an older receptionist with freckled skin and steely-gray hair. She was reading a romance novel and drinking coffee. Mounted on the wall, above the table where breakfast was served each morning, was a large television that blared out a news report about an accident that had occurred downtown earlier that day. The receptionist was happily ignoring the news report, absorbed in her novel. Harry thought the situation seemed a little sad and almost comic - the television desperately clamoring for attention like a child, with its flashing lights and siren wails, and the receptionist paying it no attention, like a negligent parent.

 

Harry greeted the receptionist as he passed her. Glancing up briefly from her novel, she smiled and replied.

 

Immediately after Harry pressed the button, the elevator opened. The walls were mirrored so that infinite hallways seemed to open up on all sides of him. Harry found himself suddenly uneasy, not wanting to look at the reflective walls. He was relieved to exit the elevator on the fourth floor, but he found that the tension in his chest was not dissipating. Something felt terribly wrong, and this feeling grew as he approached the door to his room and heard strange noises inside - a sound like a hundred plastic bags being mashed together and intermittent voices. 

 

Leaning against the door and breathing hard, Harry gripped his wand and pulled it part of the way out of his pocket. Not wanting to alarm the other guests or draw attention to himself, he grunted through the door, "Who's there?" in a low voice. No one responded, but he could still hear the plastic crashing and unintelligible murmurs. He slid his key into the card reader and yanked the heavy door wide open, pointing his wand into the room. 

 

The lights were off and no one was in the room, but the television was on, playing static. The static was the source of the crashing noise, and voices occasionally seeped through the static, as though the television were stuck in limbo between stations. 

 

Harry started to lower his wand but then hesitated; he was almost certain that Ron had not left the television on earlier, so why would it be on now?

 

He flipped the light switch but nothing happened. He exhaled irritably at the prospect of having to either conjure a new lightbulb or cast _Reparo_ on the switch, but first he wanted to find out why the television was on. After all, the dark didn't scare him. His wand extended loosely, he began to move cautiously into the room, the door swinging closed heavily behind him, until the static provided the only light in the room. 

 

Harry's eyes fell on the remote, sitting on the dresser beside the television, exactly where Ron had left it. He took the remote and sat down slowly on the corner of Ron and Hermione's bed, directly in front of the television. 

 

The static danced in front of his eyes, dazzling them. He tried to understand the voices that were straining to pierce the static. But the static muffled and hid them, just out of the range of understanding, as though they were speaking from behind a veil. Harry shivered. He didn't want to think of that now, the whispering death veil that had claimed his godfather so suddenly, without warning...

 

Shapes started to move behind the static, as though an image was struggling to come into focus. They were indistinct shapes and some seemed abstract, but Harry thought he caught a glimpse of a chair spinning upside-down, still obscured by static. Along with the voices, he began to hear a high keening - three ascending notes played in an irregular pattern. It raised the hairs on his arms. He couldn't explain why, but the notes seemed to signify imminent death. 

 

Finally the keening resolved itself into a sustained high screech and Harry decided he couldn't take any more. He hit the power button on the remote and the television flashed off, the bright static leaving stars in his eyes. When the stars faded, he found himself looking at his reflection in the black screen of the television, and at the reflection of a girl sitting beside him on the bed. Her white hands were clasped in her lap and her waist-length black hair completely covered her face.

 

Harry yelled and lurched himself off of the bed, tripping and falling on the floor in the process. He fumbled for his wand, still crawling away backwards from the bed. He was not sure why the sight of that girl had so alarmed him - it was not the fact that she was an unexpected intruder. Sure, that had startled him - but it was something about her appearance that had ramped up his terror when he had seen her there.

 

Suddenly the hotel door opened and Harry jumped. A second later the light came on and Ron was walking into the room, looking happily dazed. Harry was too spooked to note that the light was now working again. There was no sign of a black-haired girl in the room. 

 

Ron spotted Harry on the floor and his face hardened into a worried expression at once. "What happened, Harry? Are you OK?"

 

"Yeah, I'm fine, it's just -" Harry stood up and looked under the beds and in the hotel closet. 

 

"It's just what? What just happened?" 

 

"I thought I saw a girl in the room," Harry said finally, sitting down on his own bed. He explained what had happened.

 

"Was this the same woman as in your dream?" Ron asked eagerly. 

 

"No," Harry said immediately. "No, definitely someone different. I think this may have been a child. But it was hard to tell, since I couldn't see her face." Suddenly Harry realized what had so disturbed him about her. "She reminded me of a dementor." 

 

"Ah," said Ron. He already knew about Harry's difficult history with dementors. "Do you think she might be related to the case somehow?" 

 

"I don't know," said Harry. "But I know that I've definitely felt weird around televisions since we first went in the house. It's almost like something like this was waiting to happen, like whoever's behind it was waiting to get me on my own or something. I know that sounds crazy," Harry added.

 

Ron shook his head. "I've hung with you long enough to know you're not crazy, mate. Now I just wish you weren't leaving me alone in the hotel room," he laughed a little nervously. 

 

"Well, if anything happens, then Apparate to Dexter's," Harry suggested, writing down the address for Ron to keep. "I'm sure that Dexter would understand, if something happened." 

 

"Apparate?" Ron said. "But he's a muggle. Are you planning to tell him -?"

 

"Yes, I think so," said Harry. He had been thinking about it during the drive back to the hotel. "I think that out of all of them, he could be trusted with the secret. It might help us to have someone in the investigation who knows who we really are. And I want to get to know him better, _actually_ get to know him. And I can't do that if I'm not honest about who _I_ really am." 

 

Ron looked at him for a long moment, nodding slowly. Then he smiled encouragingly. "You go for it, mate. He seems like a good guy. I want you to be happy. And between you and me," he lowered his voice conspiratorially even though they were the only ones in the room, "it'll make Ginny feel better about herself if you end up with a guy. She won't take it so personal." 

 

Harry grinned. "Thanks, Ron. Now, you stay safe and try not to have too much fun with the ghost while I'm gone."  

 

Ron groaned as he collapsed on the bed with the remote, turning on the television and flipping through channels. "Ugh," he said. "Why did you have to remind me?" 


	10. Secrets Exchanged

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! That was a long one. Once again, I'll try to have another one by the end of the week!

Dexter's apartment was on the second floor of a complex that wrapped around a small courtyard. Each apartment could be accessed by way of a concrete walkway that ran along the exterior of the second floor. 

 

As Harry waited outside of Dexter's door after knocking, he could see a half moon rising in the distance, soupy and faded because of the clouds and lights from the city. 

 

Dexter opened the door. "Hey," he said, and, with a small smile, invited Harry inside. 

 

He looked a little flustered about having company. He turned partway in a circle, gesturing vaguely at his living room as though uncertain whether he should treat Harry to a formal tour. For some reason, it turned Harry on to see a man who seemed so solemn and put-together, flustered...

 

Dexter let his hands flop back down to his sides, still looking a little awkward. "Make yourself at home." He moved behind his kitchen counter, still visible behind the window-like opening in the wall. "Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee, orange juice, beer?"

 

"Tea would be great, thank you." Harry said, sitting down on a couch near Dexter's air-conditioning unit. The couch was very soft and comfortable. 

 

Dexter came back around a moment later with a mug of tea in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. He sat in the chair adjacent to the couch, smiled, and said, "Cheers," before taking a drink of his coffee.

 

For some reason, this clearly-intentional Britishism reminded Harry of something that Debra had said the other day. "Who is Lila?" he asked. 

 

Dexter's eyes widened and he nodded slowly as he swallowed. "Ah," he said. "She was a girl I dated a while ago that Debra didn't like very much." Harry had guessed as much the other day. "She ended up being, well," Dexter moved his finger in a circle near his ear to signify, "crazy." "Debra asked you all about her because she's British," Dexter said apologetically. "And also because it gave her an opportunity to take a little jab at me."

 

"Gotta love siblings," Harry said.

 

"How many do you have?" Dexter asked.

 

"None," Harry said quickly. "But I grew up with a cousin who was a bully. And Ron's got 5 older brothers."

 

"Whoa!" Dexter said, laughing. "Poor guy." 

 

"Yeah, I think it's been pretty hard on him, overall," Harry said thoughtfully. 

 

They were silent for a moment as they drank their beverages. Then Harry decided that he may as well tell Dexter about the magical world now, while it was still early on in their conversation.

 

"Look," said Harry, and Dexter lowered his mug slightly, looking at Harry curiously. "I'm going to go ahead and get something out of the way real quick, and you don't have to take me on faith, because I'm going to show you." Harry took out his wand and Dexter eyed it warily. "Ron, Hermione, and I are all wizards," Harry said. "We're investigating this case because Kathy Merona's mother is a member of the International Confederation of Wizards. Hermione used magic to obtain the autopsy results that she did without labs or equipment."

 

Harry said this all very fast because prior experience had taught him that muggles were less likely to get confrontational if he got it over with. As he spoke, he tried to gauge Dexter's reaction, but the man's face was completely impassive. He only had a slight arch in his brow that seemed to say, "Really? Magic...how interesting." 

 

He took a breath, and then he said, "Now I'll show you." Harry drained the rest of the tea in his cup, placed the cup on the floor, and then took a few steps away. Dexter looked on, still mildly curious. Harry pointed his wand at the cup and said, " _Diffindo_." The cup shattered into a thousand pieces. Dexter winced and a furrow appeared between his eyebrows as though he were only vaguely displeased that Harry had shattered his mug and made a mess in his living room. He started to rise, either to get cleaning supplies or kick Harry out, but Harry held out a hand to him, "Wait just a moment," he said. "Watch this."

 

Harry waved his wand at the wreckage of the mug and said, " _Reparo._ " The shattered pieces of the cup sprang back together instantly, not even leaving a crack where they had been broken. Dexter took the mug with a look of amazement and traced a finger over its flawless, smooth surface.

 

"Can't argue with that," he said finally, sitting down and looking overwhelmed. "You learn new things every day and today, I guess I learned that magic is real." 

 

As Dexter shook his head wonderingly, still gazing at the cup, Harry marveled at how quickly Dexter had believed. Most muggles he had told questioned their senses, got defensive, even raged at Harry sometimes. But Harry supposed that it was natural for Dexter, a man of science, to evaluate the evidence placed in front of him and then make a dispassionate judgment. 

 

Dexter slowly placed the cup on the table. "So, why did you want to tell me this?" 

 

Harry hesitated. "A few reasons," he said. "Since we're going to be working together more closely," he gestured at himself and then at Dexter's living room, "I'd rather not have to constantly hide myself from you. Better to be out in the open."

 

Dexter nodded and smirked. "That's _one_ reason." His voice was deep, teasing, and sexy, and Harry thrilled to hear a note of flirtation in it. 

 

"Another reason," Harry hastened to add, "is that it's always good to have a muggle in the know when we're working with muggles on cases -"

 

"What's a muggle?" Dexter's face was blank.

 

"Non-magic people," Harry said.

 

"Oh."

 

"It's good to have at least one muggle in the know," Harry went on, "So that if you see something and suspect that it can be solved with magic, you can report it to us. Like, if you see a suspect speeding away in a car, but weren't able to catch him, we could just Apparate to wherever he is and catch him easily."

 

"Oh," said Dexter again. 

 

Harry was about to continue listing scenarios in which magic could help them solve crimes when he suddenly stiffened and felt his stomach recoil. Behind Dexter's head, in Harry's line of vision, was the entrance to Dexter's hallway. The light in the hallway was off, and because it was nighttime, it was too dark to see very far down it - but Harry thought he had spied a flit of movement as he spoke to Dexter - a bent and bony figure retreating - a hint of grayish, rotting skin - and no sign of a face, perhaps because it was hidden by long, thick hair that matched the shadows of the hallway?

 

"Are you ok?" Dexter asked, looking concerned.

 

Harry didn't answer for a moment, craning his neck as he peered down the hallway. Everything there was dark now; he very well could have imagined the figure, as he was still feeling jumpy from earlier in the evening.

 

"Is anyone else here?" Harry asked tensely.

 

"No," said Dexter, looking over his shoulder. 

 

Harry felt a trickle of wetness on his forehead and realized that he had broken out in a cold sweat. "Something weird happened earlier, just before I came over," he said. Then he told Dexter about the television being on in the hotel room, and how he had seen the strange figure reflected beside him. 

 

As he described her, a strange look came over Dexter's face and he interrupted, "Wait, I thought we had the same dream."

 

Harry was confused. "We did," he said, taking out the picture of the unknown woman before the mirror.

 

"Huh," said Dexter. "Well, I guess my dream might have been a little different. If I understand your description correctly, then this girl with the hidden face was also in my dream. Or, actually, I think _I_ was supposed to be her in the dream. When that woman," Dexter pointed at the sketch, "moved away from the mirror, I saw my reflection in it. And I was the girl with the rotting skin and hidden face. That was what shocked me awake."

 

"Oh," said Harry. "Maybe she was in mine, then, too - and I just didn't look in the mirror." 

 

Dexter shook his head and looked troubled for a moment. "She's trying to tell us different things." 

 

"Who? The woman or the girl?" 

 

"I don't know..." Dexter said. He lowered his forehead into his palms, then a moment later, looked up at Harry again. "Have you ever," he asked, "in the course of your work...had to kill a man?" 

 

Harry didn't expect the question, so he was stunned for a moment. And as he always did when considering the men he had killed, he felt a shiver of moral uncertainty - a need to go back through his history and tally the lives, weigh the evil he had exterminated against the evil of exterminating other humans - and make sure that his moral scale was still intact. 

 

After a minute of thinking about it seriously, Harry said, "I have killed some people in my life - some even before I started my career." By way of explanation, he added, "There was a psychopath who was after me from the time of my birth because of a prophecy saying that I'd be his downfall, so I had to be on the defensive basically from the time that I entered the magical world. That's why I had to kill a few men before my career started. Anyway," he set down his empty mug on the table. "I like to think that, in all of those cases, those people had caused greater pain with their life than I was causing by bringing about their deaths - and so I was doing the world a service." Harry ended his sentence with a raised inflection, uncertain about what Dexter would think of him after such a confession. 

 

But Dexter was looking at Harry as though he were a miracle. He asked in a hushed voice, "How old were you...when you had to kill for the first time?"

 

"11," Harry said. "One of my professors was trying to strangle me - he was working with Voldemort, the psychopath wizard - and as I put up my hands to defend myself, he burned into ashes." 

 

When Dexter looked confused, he added, "My mother died to save me, so that put a protective enchantment on me which prevents anyone from killing me...unless they get kind of creative about it." 

 

Dexter blinked and something else unrecognizable stirred in his face. "Your mother," he said slowly. "You said she was in your dream, too, right?" 

 

Harry nodded.

 

"I'd like to be open with you, too, Harry," Dexter said. He hesitated and smiled. "Sorry," he said. "It's just funny. My foster father was named Harry." 

 

"Was?" Harry asked.

 

"He passed away, a few years ago now." 

 

"I'm sorry to hear that," Harry said. 

 

"It's OK," said Dexter. "As you mentioned, you've seen your fair share of tragedy, too, so you know that life goes on. Anyway, what I want to tell you, Harry," Dexter turned in his seat, squared his feet on the floor. "is that I have also killed people. And like you, I live with it because I have only endeavored to kill those who deserve it...I live by a code." Dexter gazed past Harry's head, in the direction of the wall with the air conditioning unit, apparently lost in thought. "I'm learning that we're a lot alike, Harry - our pasts, our losses - but there's one thing that sets us apart: you are a defender - you kill when it is necessary. I am a hunter." 

 

His dark eyes gleamed with something animal and he smiled grimly. Harry didn't know what Dexter was trying to say. He had assumed that, as part of Miami's police force, Dexter may have had to kill people in the past - if a criminal tried to attack him for example. How, then, were Dexter's career kills different from his own? Unless he was trying to say that -

 

"I like killing," Dexter clarified, gesturing at himself. He was breathing heavily. "It's more than that - it's a need - a perversion that was born when I watched my mother murdered in front of me."

 

Harry's heart clenched, and he could hear his own mother's voice ringing in his head, terrified and pleading. "Not Harry! No, take me instead!"

 

"Psychologically, I am probably very similar to the Voldemort you mentioned." Dexter bowed his head. "But Harry taught me to do good by it. I go after killers. The ones who slip out of the justice system. They avoid prison, but they can't avoid me, in the end." 

 

Harry gazed at the man who usually exuded calmness and indifference, but who, now, practically leaned toward Harry, seeking understanding...seeking absolution. He tried to imagine a "need" to kill. He couldn't do it. He enjoyed the thrill of his job, the rendering of criminals unto justice - but killing was always a last resort. Yet just because he couldn't imagine something didn't make it wrong. He could find no fault with the idea of killing criminals who took the lives of the innocent. That was what he had done with Voldemort; that was what Molly Weasley, the kindest, most good-at-heart woman he knew, had done with Bellatrix Lestrange. If Dexter needed to kill, well, then it was good that he killed bad people - that's all there was to it.

 

Then, from a distant corner of Harry's memory, he heard a familiar voice counseling him. "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

 

Harry smiled to himself.

 

"Don't worry," he said to Dexter. He reached out and took the man's hands in his own. They were warm and rough. He looked him in the eyes. "I know what it's like to feel like there's something wrong with you." Memories of being called the Heir of Slytherin in his second year, and feeling snakelike stirrings of Voldemort within him in his fifth year, made him shiver. "I think it's great that you've taken a terrible urge and done good with it."

 

Dexter exhaled deeply, seemingly with relief, and closed his eyes. All of the hard lines of his face seemed to disappear briefly. "You really mean it?" he asked.

 

"Yes," said Harry.

 

Dexter gave a joyful laugh as he sat back up and reclined in his chair. "It's such a relief to be honest with someone," he said. "I have to lie to everyone, you understand. If my sister knew what I was, she'd be horrified..." he shook his head, clearly appalled by the idea. "My girlfriend thought I was doing drugs for a while."

 

"Lila?" 

 

Dexter waved his hand. "No, Rita. She was before Lila. But I had to pretend that I was a recovering heroin user simply because that's so much better than admitting what I really am. It was awful." 

 

"I bet," said Harry. 

 

Suddenly Dexter's eyes fell on the picture of the woman on the table and he seemed to remember it. "Anyway, back to business," he said, picking up the picture and walking toward the opposite side of the room. Harry followed him to a desk with a computer and a printer.

 

"We're going to see if mystery lady pops up in the system," Dexter explained.

 

"The system?"

 

"When you have my job, you have access to a few helpful databases," Dexter said, opening the top of the printer, putting the picture face-down, and hitting the scan button. The machine began to churn, like a beast unwillingly woken from its slumber. "The DNA database, the STD database, the mug-shot database, and the media database, which is basically images from newspapers and stuff. We're going to try the last two databases." 

 

Dexter lowered himself into his swivel chair, which glided across the floor in response to his weight. He pulled himself to his desk, keyed his password into the computer, and then pulled up a very plain webpage that stated that it was the employee portal to the Miami Metro Police Department's digital records. 

 

"All right," Dexter said, "Let's upload the jpeg." After he located the scanned image in the file browser, the webpage displayed a loading bar. "It's checking for matches," he explained to Harry. "And even though it's Miami Metro's site, it has records from all over the country. It's helped me quite a few times on my...projects." 

 

A green check-mark and "See matches" button appeared on the screen. 

 

"It's ready!" Harry said excitedly. Dexter clicked into the page and they found themselves facing 8 thumbnails of female mugshots. All of the women looked very similar to the woman in the sketch. Brown or black hair, thin, austere faces, cold eyes - all glaring at the camera as they clutched their prisoner numbers. But Harry knew with a mysterious certainty that none of these women were the one that they were looking for. He gazed into all of their eyes and saw nothing but pixels; whereas he felt quite sure that, when they found _her_ , she would gaze right back at him.

 

Simultaneously, Dexter and Harry looked at each other and said, "Nope."

 

"OK," Dexter said. "Let's try the other one." He clicked through a few more pages and repeated the process of uploading the jpeg. The loading bar popped up again. "This one'll take a few more minutes," Dexter explained. "since it's got any kind of image from a newspaper, and there are more of those than criminals." He smiled grimly again. 

 

While waiting for the second database to load, they walked to the kitchen together and refilled their drinks. Dexter watched delightedly as Harry waved his wand at the Keurig and caused it to immediately pour steaming coffee into Dexter's mug.

 

"Now _that's_ Instant Coffee," Dexter said. They both laughed.

 

When they walked back over to the computer, eighteen pages of results had loaded. Dexter groaned. But Harry, his eyes roving over the women on the first page, gasped when he reached the second-to-last row on the screen.

 

"Holy shit! Is that her?" 

 

"Now you sound like my sister," Dexter smirked, but then looked more seriously at the screen. He clicked on the picture that Harry was pointing at, expanding it into a full-page article topped by a picture. In the photo, a grim-faced woman stood in profile at the sea-side, while a group of men in the background seemed to be lugging in an oddly-shaped bag from the waves. The headline of the article was, "Mysterious Sickness Strikes Morgan Ranch Horses."

 

"Horses," Dexter said faintly, looking at Harry. It was hard to match the woman in profile's features exactly with those of the sketch. For one, she was turned to the side and it appeared to be raining where she was, making her face a little blurry. She also wore her dark hair in a hat. But something about her had jumped out at Harry when his eyes had fallen on her, and he could tell that the same had happened to Dexter. Dexter wonderingly placed a finger on the screen over the bag that the men were dragging. With a jolt, Harry realized that the bag must contain the corpse of a drowned horse.

 

Harry started to read the article aloud. "Richard and Anna Morgan of Moesko Island, known well locally as champion horse breeders, have faced an extended, unsettling tragedy these last few months. Their well-trained, pampered horses have undergone a disturbing change in behavior, reacting with anxiety and even terror to unseen stimuli. The horror at the Morgan ranch reached an unprecedented level today when five horses broke free of the Morgans' barn and fences and galloped a mile to the shore, where they drowned themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Morgan wept for their horses, who they say are like children to them. Despite their grief, they agreed to share some details about the horses' history of illness..."

 

Harry trailed off, his eyes wide as he gazed at Anna. He couldn't believe he had found her so fast. "Where is Moesko Island?" he asked. "Off the coast of Florida?"

 

Dexter shook his head, biting his lip. "That's the weird part." he said. "Look here." He pointed at the bottom of the article, where the journalist and location were listed. Moesko Island, Washington. 

 

"Washington," Harry said. "Washington _state?_ " 

 

Dexter nodded. "Exact opposite corner of the country from where we are," he said. He held the sketch of Anna up to the photograph, looking at them critically. "I'm sure that it's her," he told Harry. Then he addressed the photograph. "But all the same, Anna, I wonder what your horse problems from 30 years ago have to do with our murder..."


	11. Intimate Ties

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been two weeks! I know, I'm terrible. But hopefully you'll all enjoy this chapter, since it is steamy in nature. Also, be forewarned that this chapter has some of the kink that the tags warn about. 
> 
> Hoping to have another one out by the end of the weekend. Please comment and let me know your thoughts!

Dexter printed out every newspaper article mentioning the name, "Anna Morgan," that had been written within a 25 mile radius of Moesko Island. He rifled through them as he walked back to the couch.

 

Beckoning distractedly and patting the couch beside him, he said, "You wanna come look through these with me? See what we can find?"

 

"Sure," Harry said, his heart beating rapidly. He took a seat beside Dexter, breathing in his clean, masculine scent as he grabbed a handful of articles.

 

Harry started to scan through the articles. Most of them dated before the first article that had popped up in the database, and they were all far more banal... _Moesko Island Lighthouse Historical Society celebrates landmark centennial...Upcoming Horse Show at Grey Meadows Canceled...Anna and Richard Morgan win first place in Gallup Competition..._

Harry felt distracted. "So," he said, laying the first few articles aside. "Let me turn the question on you."

 

"What question's that?" Dexter asked, his brow furrowed as he continued to browse through papers.

 

"You asked me why I told you about being a wizard. I explained. Why did you tell me your secret?"

 

Dexter glanced over at Harry briefly, and the latter noticed how large and lovely his eyelashes were. "I think it might be relevant to the case," Dexter said.

 

"How so?"

 

"Remember when I said that I think our dreams meant two different things?"

 

"Yeah,"

 

"Well, I've got a hunch that our hair-face girl is a killer."

 

Harry was stunned. "How do you figure that? I'd only gotten so far as guessing that she was dead."

 

Dexter shook his head and shivered a little involuntarily, looking straight ahead. "Just a feeling I got," he said. "When Anna moved away from the mirror and I saw the girl there, looking back at me out of the glass, I just felt as though she were saying, 'I'm just like you, I see the monster in you.' And I feel like the same thing didn't happen to you because you aren't like me."

 

Harry blinked. "I don't think you're a monster."

 

Dexter smiled sweetly, then looked down and said, "I think we might have found our girl, by the way."

 

"Really?" Harry said, full of interest, "Where?"

 

Dexter pointed at the article that he was reading. It was another article about the horses' sickness. Harry squinted to read the line that Dexter was pointing at. "...too distraught to answer questions, Mrs. Morgan held her daughter while veterinarians tranquilized the bleating horses...

 

Harry's eyes darted up to the photograph. This photograph was even less helpful than the first one. In the foreground, a man with a rough and weary face (Mr. Morgan? Harry thought) bent over a horse that lay on its side. In the background, two feminine figures were barely visible, turned away from the scene. The taller figure was tightly clinging onto the smaller one. Though the head of the smaller figure was pressed into the body of the larger one, Harry thought he could distinguish long hair, perhaps waist-length...

 

"Daughter," Harry repeated the key word from the article, looking at the girl. "I wish we had a name -"

 

"We can find that out," Dexter said.

 

"Of course," Harry bowed in deference to Dexter's databases. "Still, I wonder what happened to her...If she were still alive, she'd be, what - 30...maybe even 40 years old now?" 

 

"Yes," said Dexter. "And what does she have to do with Kathy?"

 

"Dunno," Harry said blankly. 

 

They sat there silently for a moment, and then Dexter put his hand on the arm of the couch to push himself up. "Well, maybe more coffee will help," he said wryly. Then, midway into a standing position, he crumpled, clutching his knees and letting out a painful exclamation. 

 

"Are you OK?" Harry asked, leaping to his feet.

 

"Yes, I'm fine," Dexter said gruffly, clearly still hurting. "Just threw out my back. Seems to happen more and more now that I've passed 30..."

 

"Well, here, let's get you to your bed," Harry said distractedly, gripping Dexter around the shoulders and starting to lead the hunched man toward the hallway. "We can have you lie down and then see if we can get your back right again." 

 

Dexter winced as Harry gripped his shoulders to guide him. "Could you - could you," he stammered, "use magic to lift me or something?"

 

"Oh, yeah," Harry said quickly, taking a step away from Dexter. " _Mobilicorpus._ " 

 

His back still curved, Dexter's feet rose off of the ground and he rotated forward so that he faced the ground, his back arched in the air. Dexter exhaled with clear relief and said, "Wow, that's much better."

 

Harry started to walk toward the hallway, carefully guiding the floating Dexter over his armchair and dining room table and beneath the low ceiling lintel. "That's not the first time I've forgotten I could do magic when it should have been the obvious solution," Harry said, chortling. "Which of these is your room?"

 

"The door straight ahead," Dexter said.

 

Leaving Dexter floating in the middle of the hallway, Harry pushed open the door, turned on the light and entered, turning around once inside to guide Dexter through the doorway. Once Dexter was floating above the center of the meticulously-made bed, Harry started to lower him very gently until he was resting flat on his stomach on the mattress. Again, Dexter sighed, seemingly relieved that the straightening out of his spine upon landing had not caused him great pain. 

 

"Do you still feel pain?" Harry asked.

 

"Not now," Dexter said, his voice muffled against the blankets. "But I'm afraid to move." He laughed, apparently at his own helplessness. 

 

"Here, how about I -" Harry tentatively sat on the bed, "How about I massage your back and that way we can find out if you still have a knot there?"

 

"OK, sounds good," Dexter said, and Harry was ecstatic that Dexter's voice sounded pleasant and light - not hesitant and begrudging. Harry could tell that Dexter found the prospect of being massaged pleasant, an impression which was confirmed when Harry first began to squeeze his shoulders and Dexter let out a happy, "Mmmmm."

 

"You're good at that," Dexter said, as one of Harry's hands moved up to gently knead the base of Dexter's neck. Harry wove his fingers into the curly hair at the bottom of Dexter's head and massaged his scalp as well. 

 

"Thanks," said Harry, "My ex-girlfriend thought so, too. I got a lot of practice with her." His other hand worked methodically across the top of Dexter's back, from one shoulder to the other, feeling the tight skin between his shoulder blades through his thin shirt. "She told me that I have an intuitive touch."

 

"That you do," Dexter half-whispered, his voice almost a moan. "Wait just a moment," he said. He slid his hands beneath his torso. "My shirt tag keeps scratching against me, let me just -" His hands came out from beneath him and the cloth of the shirt spread - Dexter had unbuttoned it. His heart beating quickly, Harry helped Dexter slide the shirt first off of one arm and then the other.

 

"Thanks," Dexter said. "You can just set it on that chair over there." As Harry deposited the shirt on the chair, he watched Dexter's muscles undulate under his brown skin as he breathed. 

 

He resumed his massage, moving lower over Dexter's back and inwards toward his spine. At one moment, Dexter winced and made a yelping noise.

 

"Hmm, that may be the spot," Harry said, resting a hand gently over the quivering skin.

 

"No kidding," Dexter said weakly.

 

"I'm going to rub just this spot," Harry said, "Try to loosen it up."

 

He started to move his fist in calming circles, deeper and deeper, over the spot, and he felt Dexter gradually relax. 

 

"Wow," Dexter breathed, "Much better." 

 

Harry shifted his hands further down, over the back of Dexter's ribs and toward his hips. "Let's see about your lower back -"

 

Dexter twitched and his hands came in closer to his chest. "Wait," he said, his voice suddenly light and quivery.

 

Harry's hands were poised over Dexter's left side, between his ribs and his hip. "Does it hurt here, too?" Harry asked, bewildered, resuming his massaging motion. 

 

To his surprise, Dexter contorted beneath his hands, laughing heartily and trying to crawl away. "Oh, I see." said Harry, smiling and now deliberately tickling Dexter's side, squeezing gently with his fingertips. He clamped his legs on either side of Dexter's legs as the latter tried to writhe out of reach. "Someone's very ticklish."

 

Dexter laughed hysterically, too hard to even form words, reaching back in a vain attempt to block Harry's hands. It delighted Harry that this strong, serious man was so desperately and helplessly ticklish. 

 

And now that he was straddling Dexter, the man's struggling legs rubbed Harry pleasantly, making him more and more excited as he began to also tickle Dexter's right side, jumping his hand up and down from Dexter's bucking hip to the top of his ribs - even running up further to briefly tickle Dexter's underarm - and back down again, feeling his torso quake in response to his light, unbearable touches...

 

Then all of a sudden, the world reversed. In a flash of motion, Harry found himself landing on his back on the bed where Dexter had just been, his hands pinned up by his ears and his legs now trapped beneath Dexter's weight. Somehow Dexter had escaped and overpowered him.

 

Dexter's face was very close to Harry's. It was flushed with laughter and his eyelids were low with exhaustion as he breathed heavily. Harry was worried for a moment that Dexter was about to get angry with him, that once he had fully recovered, his face might harden and he might say, "Don't ever touch me that way again."

 

Instead, a sly smile broke across Dexter's weary face as he slowly pulled Harry's hands even higher up, over his head. Harry did not try to struggle - not that he could have, even if he had wanted to. Dexter was far stronger than him. 

 

When his hands were right next to each other above his head, his fingers barely touching the cool bottom of Dexter's pillow, Dexter pinned both wrists with one of his own hands. This left his other hand free to stroke down the length of Harry's stretched-out left arm.

 

Harry gave a primal moan from the pleasure of the light tough of Dexter's rough fingers. Then, as Dexter's wiggling fingers neared his elbow and upper arm, his moan dissolved into unending giggles. _How strange!_ He thought, as Dexter smiled at his reaction and lingered in that spot. _Who knew I was ticklish there?_ The laughter poured forth from his mouth freely, and though he wiggled beneath Dexter's fingers, he found it very liberating to be dominated by him in this way - unable to stop the pleasurable, fluttering touch that raised goosebumps and hairs on the fleshy part of his upper arm.

 

As Dexter relented in his tickling, Harry, feeling a little dazed, leaned up slightly and kissed him on the lips. Dexter was too surprised to arrange his lips in time, so the kiss was bumpy and awkward. Harry lay back on the pillows, again concerned that he had gone too far. 

 

But a moment later, Dexter was looking down at him with a strange expression that was almost sad - it was only after several seconds that Harry recognized the expression as one of overwhelming tenderness. Harry's kiss had touched this cold, closed man somehow.

 

"You still want me?" Dexter murmured with disbelief. "Even after what I told you?"

 

 _Of course,_ Harry realized.  _Dexter's worried that I'm afraid of him now._

 

"Yes," Harry breathed, turning his face to the side, feeling the pillow against his cheek and Dexter's serious gaze on his profile. "I've only begun to get to know you, Dexter, and I like what I see so far. I want to know more, if you'll let me in." 

 

With a moan of relief and longing, Dexter buried his face in Harry's neck. 


	12. "A hiding place where no one ever goes"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Easter! [Insert typical request for feedback/commentary and hopefully-not-empty promise that the next chapter will come soon]

When Harry left Dexter's after midnight, he was swaggering slightly and felt like he was glowing all over. The soft Miami sea breeze caressed his body in the dark, raising memory impressions of Dexter's kisses all over his skin, giving him goosebumps again. 

 

As he drove outside of the parking lot, he turned on the radio to 96.5, one of Miami's top hits radio stations. Because of his exuberant mood, Harry found himself wanting to belt out the lyrics to obnoxious, upbeat pop songs. Normally that wasn't his favorite kind of music, but tonight was different.

 

Adam Levine howled at him from the car's radio console, and then Harry joined in with him as he sang about stalking his lover like a predator. He tapped the steering wheel as he sat at a light. Oddly, he was the only one at the intersection, but then again, it was very late on a weeknight.

 

The light flooded the dark intersection with green light, and Harry sped away onto a ramp and then down a lonely highway, back in the direction of the hotel. The landscape around him grew darker as he left the neon lights of Dexter's neighborhood behind for the dark of the highway. 

 

Suddenly, static started to invade the Maroon 5 song, clouding over Adam Levine's voice as though someone were trying to suffocate him with a rustling plastic bag. His nasally voice fought to tear through the static, but soon he was entirely overcome - buried beneath the crash of the static.

 

Harry frowned. He hadn't gone outside of the city limits, so he didn't understand why he had suddenly lost reception for the radio station. Just as he was about to pan through other radio stations, however, the static abruptly gave way to a new song. The song was playing perfectly, without any static interruptions. It was much gentler and more organic than the last song - just a few guitars plucking along, riffing pleasantly off of each other. Harry was sure that he had heard the song before, and this was confirmed when a lovely duet of male voices begin to sing scat in the background: "Do-dedodo, do do dodo, do do dododoo..."

 

It was "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon and Garfunkel! Harry grinned. The song brought back a funny memory of the Dursleys: Uncle Vernon cursing in the car during a trip to the grocery store, switching off the oldies station when Simon and Garfunkel came on. "Bloody pansy hippies," he'd grumbled. Harry, who had always found their music pleasant, did not understand why Uncle Vernon had felt so negatively about them - but then, he supposed that he and Uncle Vernon didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things. Harry was also unsure why "Mrs. Robinson" was playing on a Top 40 station, but he gave up wondering about it and simply began to sing along in the middle of the song:

 

" _Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes._

_Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes._

_It's a little secret, just the Robinsons' affair._

_Most of all, you've got to hide it from the kids."_

With a sensation of being doused with a bucket of cold water, Harry suddenly felt something like a fist gripping his heart. He swerved and nearly hit the sidewalk as he careened into the parking lot of the hotel and parked jaggedly in a random parking spot. The refrain washed over him, but he couldn't get past that verse, a verse which suddenly felt crucial to him. As he sat, breathing hard, his heart pounding, he heard the crackle of static start to invade the song, and it puttered completely out before the beginning of the next verse. The static then immediately faded into the middle of a Meghan Trainor song. 

 

It was almost as though the Simon and Garfunkel song had been _inserted_ somehow into the radio station - for his benefit. From somewhere in his memory, Harry heard a TV broadcaster say, "We interrupt your regular programming to bring you..." That's what this felt like - someone trying to convey a special message to him.

 

Clearly, he knew that it was meant to be a clue about why Kathy's body was found in the pantry. The reference to sordid family secrets increased his suspicion that this had to do Jill Merona and her longtime alienation from her daughter. But this still left a lot of questions. In the song, the secret was an actual, sexual affair. What was the secret in the Merona family? Was it Kathy herself? Did Jill want to hide her from the world because she was a Squib? And if Jill had killed her, then what role did Anna Morgan and her faceless daughter play? 

 

Hopelessly confused, his heart still beating quickly, Harry left the car and went straight up to bed.


	13. Any Place can be a Prison

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi friends :) Here's the next installment. I was hoping to get two chapters out this weekend, but I'm still working on the next one, so hopefully it'll be out in the next day or two. 
> 
> As always, I'm hungry for your comments and feedback :) Thank you for continuing to read, if you've made it this far.

The troubled dreams came again. 

 

Once again, Harry started in the Dursleys' house. But this time, he was alone in the kitchen. And he felt dread immediately.

 

It was almost night; he could tell from the red, dying rays that colored the window above the sink. All of the lights in the house were out - it was just barely light enough from the outside light to see through the shadows and gloom that crept into the kitchen as the sunlight drained from it.

 

Harry stood, wanting to investigate the house. It was a strange time of evening for the house to be so empty. Normally, Aunt Petunia would be making dinner now, Uncle Vernon would be loudly criticizing the newsman in the living room, and Dudley would be returning home from his gang's nightly routine of terrorizing the neighborhood. But none of this was happening. 

 

The heavy, self-conscious silence reminded Harry uncomfortably of the night that he had left Privet Drive for the last time just before he came of age. Like he wanted so badly to feel tenderness for this place, but could only conjure emptiness.

 

Harry moved from the kitchen into the foyer. He glanced in the living room, which stood opposite the kitchen, and then as he turned toward the stairs, he noticed it: the cupboard under the stairs. Its door was slowly, silently drifting part of the way open. He couldn't see inside because the door was opening toward him - a senseless terror tore his stomach to shreds. He did not want to go in the cupboard, but he knew that if he walked away, whatever was inside would pursue him and make him see what they wanted him to see.

 

It took him an eternity to walk over to the cupboard door. He reached toward his pocket, but his wand wasn't there. He felt horribly vulnerable. 

 

The door made no noise as he eased it the rest of the way open and peered cautiously inside. It was very dark in there. He could only just make out the shape of his little bed against the wall, and the corner of the tiny table where he had once kept his toy soldiers. Though he had not slept in the cupboard since he was 10, the Dursleys had never removed the bed and desk from it. Squinting to see these two pieces of furniture in the gloom, Harry felt a piercing pity for his younger self, remembering evenings when he had been locked in here for some silly punishment - sitting in the closet-sized space in the pitch dark, feeling the occasional spider dart across his ankle, listening to the Dursleys enjoying family time in the rest of the house...

 

"I know your pain, Harry Potter." 

 

The sudden child's whisper from the dark chilled his blood, and before he could react, the door swung shut behind him. Harry backed against it, fumbling behind him for the handle with one hand and holding the other one out in front of him, hoping to protect himself. He heard the rustle of cloth and perceived a dark, hunched silhouette that seemed to sit up from the bed, stand, and walk toward him - slowly and purposefully. Harry's frantically searching hand landed on the door handle, but when he twisted it, he found it to be locked, as though Uncle Vernon had turned the key from the outside.

 

As she got closer, Harry could see the dark stripe of hair, blacker than the darkness of the cupboard, that covered her face and clung wetly to her tattered dress. He smelled rot. 

 

As the door was no longer useful as an escape route, Harry started to edge toward the corner of the room where the table was, putting both arms in front of him to fend off the figure. As he made to pass her, however, the girl's arm leapt out from her side suddenly and latched onto his left forearm. A searing sensation radiated from her hand, and he felt a matching burn in his scar. As his vision started to grow hazy from pain, he felt one last twinge of horror at the sight of her arm - gray-green, sagging, waterlogged skin, several fingernails missing from the bony, bloody nubs of her fingers - overall, the decomposition of her arms reminded Harry of Kathy's face....

 

She pulled Harry toward herself with surprising strength, and with a whirl of color, he found himself in a different place - just as cramped and closet-like, but filled with light and noise and seeming to possess an opening on one side. Stumbling from being pulled so hard, he tripped toward the opening but then stopped suddenly: The floor ended and a huge drop waited beyond the lip of the floor he stood on. He felt a little sick, thinking of how he had almost taken a deadly fall. 

 

He peeked out over the floor and found the source of the noise. Horses, at least ten of them, neighing, tossing their tails, drinking noisily from troughs. Harry looked behind him and saw a little pink bed against the wall that gave him the same feeling of sadness as the sight of his little bed in the cupboard. How could anyone sleep here with all of the racket and the pungent smell of horse shit? 

 

In his glance behind him, he hadn't seen the girl, but her hand now relatched around his forearm, burning him again. He yelled out in shock, but did not resist as she dragged him once more -

 

Now he found himself stumbling forward in an open place, breathing in the freshness of the outdoors. His knees knocked painfully against something hard and made of stone. He gripped it with his hands to keep himself from falling down. As he steadied himself, his eyes took in a tree on a hillside in the near distance. Its autumn leaves were a vivid red, intensified by the rays of the setting sun behind it.

 

Harry looked down at the object that he was clutching and felt vertigo such as he had never felt before, not even when he had almost fallen from the barn loft moments ago: to his right and left, he saw the grass, but between his hands, a stone hole - immeasurably deep - dipped into the ground: a well. The contrast of the depth of the well and the ground that he stood on was dizzying. 

 

As he caught his breath, he heard someone approach swiftly behind him. He knew immediately that it was not the girl - the steps were louder, more violent, more decisive. He barely had time to turn his head and see the melancholy, wasted face of Anna Morgan, squinting through tears, before she had pulled a black, plastic garbage bag from behind her back and whipped it over his head.

 

Harry fought against the suffocating darkness, but his energy quickly drained as he struggled to take breath. On the verge of losing consciousness, he experienced a moment of terror as he felt himself tipped forward, and he knew that he was diving headfirst into the hellish, bottomless abyss of the well. Pain tore up Harry's arms and legs as they scraped against the stone walls. A scream fought to escape from his chest, but he did not have the breath to give it voice. 

 

With a tremendous splash, Harry felt the plastic plaster itself against him from the impact of the water, suffocating him again. Harry thrashed in the bag, and though it was difficult to throw it off in the water, he eventually managed it. He swam up toward the light, pushing the dirty, grainy water away from himself as he broke the surface. 

 

He screamed up at the coin-sized circle of sky that he saw far above him, calling for help. But no answer came. Instead, with a horrible grinding noise, the circle above him became a crescent, partially obscured by the well's lid, and then finally the lid had closed all the way, and all he could make out now was a thin ring of light. A sad, mocking symbol of his imprisonment. 

 

Harry blinked, and when he opened his eyes, he found that he was suddenly not in the well anymore. He was looking up at the ceiling fan in his hotel room, which made a calm whirring noise as it tried to whip cold into the hot Miami air.

 

 _What a strange way to awake from a dream_ , he thought. Whenever he had a nightmare as distressing as that one, he was almost always jolted awake by something sudden or traumatic in the dream. He never simply transitioned from dreaming to waking with the blink of an eye. The lack of a waking shock unnerved Harry and made everything that he had just experienced somehow feel more real.

 

He checked the luminous alarm clock beside him. 3:52. With a groan, he got to his feet and staggered to the bathroom. 

 

As he washed his hands after relieving himself, he noticed a dark spot on his arm. Curiously, he switched on the light and stepped closer to the mirror, as he didn't have his glasses on.

 

A little red hand-print was burned into his forearm. 

 

Harry backed against the door of the bathroom and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, touching the child's hand-print on his arm. It was hot to the touch, like a sunburn. He knew that he should be frightened that a dead girl was haunting him. But instead, he found himself weeping as he placed his large, adult hand over the small mark on his arm, imagining her tiny body sailing down into a hole in the ground, thrown away like trash. 

 

 _How could Anna have done that_? Harry wondered. _What convinced her that a little girl deserved to be shut up away from the world, first in a barn and then in a well?_

 

While Harry did not yet understand this, he thought that he was starting to understand the message that the girl was trying to send him. He thought of how she had waited for him in his cupboard, how she had whispered, "I know your pain, Harry Potter."

 

She knew what it was like to be trapped and neglected by the people who were supposed to love her. 

 

Wiping away his tears, Harry stood up, heavy with grief, and walked back to bed.


	14. Marvolous Revelations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! Another long-ish one. I put this one together quite fast, so I am always happy to hear comments and feedback if you have any. Enjoy :)

In the morning, Harry and Ron woke up to find a note that Hermione had left on top of the dresser, telling them to get dressed and head down to continental breakfast as soon as they bothered to get their asses out of bed.

 

When they got down there 15 minutes later, they found Hermione at a corner table, flipping through a pile of papers. 

 

"Good morning," Harry said as they approached the table. 

 

She looked up, then down at her phone where the time was displayed. "About time, sleepyheads," she said, rolling her eyes. "I've been up for hours. You won't believe what I've found on Jill Merona."

 

"Before you get into any of that," Ron interjected. "Food."

 

He and Harry navigated between the families who clamored around the waffle iron, taking some eggs, sausages, and cereal, before rejoining Hermione at the table.

 

"Remember when we asked Jill Merona if she thought that any of her opponents might be the sort of pureblood fanatics who'd attack Squibs?" Hermione said as they dug into their breakfast.

 

"Yeah," said Harry.

 

"Well, turns out that those people wouldn't likely be her opponents," Hermione said grimly. "Take a look at some of these bills that Jill has voted for over the years: tax cuts for families with all-magical lineages, a bill forbidding wizards under 25 from marrying Muggles, a bill not allowing Muggles in wizard families to use magical health facilities, and then how about this one," Hermione placed the paper on the table for emphasis. "Forcible Obliviation and adoption for Squibs older than 10."

 

"Did any of these pass?" Ron asked, aghast. 

 

"Only the bill prohibiting Muggles from using magical health facilities," Hermione said. "But the point is, her support of this legislation definitely raises her up on my list of people who might target Kathy just because she was a Squib."

 

"Well if that was the case, then why did she mention Kathy being a Squib to us?" Ron asked, his mouth full of egg. "Remember, she was the one who brought that up. You'd think, if she killed her, that she would keep that information low on the radar."

 

"She let it  _slip_ , more like," Hermione said. "Didn't you see her face when she said it? Like Hagrid when he used to accidentally tell us more than he should."

 

Harry couldn't help smiling, thinking of how Hagrid had once been one of their regular (inadvertent) sources of information in their early days of investigating the odd goings-on at Hogwarts. It certainly sounded like Jill Merona came from a bigoted crowd, much like the Malfoys and the Gaunts in England. Harry already knew that people who clung so dogmatically to their backward beliefs could do dangerous things...

 

Suddenly, upon thinking of the Gaunts, two pieces of memory connected like a jigsaw puzzle for Harry. "I should have recognized her for what she was," he said aloud. "She reminded me of Marvolo Gaunt when we met her. When Leah spilled the sugar and Jill barked at her to clean it up - it made me think of Bob Ogden's memory that Dumbledore took me into...Marvolo yelling at his daughter when she dropped a pan. The same irrational fury directed at any perceived weakness in the child's magical abilities..." Harry trailed off thoughtfully. 

 

Ron and Hermione nodded solemnly. They had not visited Ogden's memory, but they had heard Harry's account of it before.

 

"So what'd you get up to last night?" Ron asked Harry, smiling subtly - clearly asking about Harry's romantic advances as well as his progress on the case. Thankfully, Hermione did not notice his double meaning.

 

Harry recounted the information that he and Dexter had gleaned from their search through the database - the identification of the dream woman as Anna Morgan and the brief mention of her as-yet nameless daughter. Ron and Hermione were just as baffled as he was about how a mother and daughter from the opposite side of the country could have anything to do with Kathy Merona's death. 

 

Skipping over the romantic events of the evening, Harry then found himself attempting to explain what had happened in the car. "So I was driving back, listening to a Maroon 5 song on the top hits radio," he told them, "and then suddenly the song faded out in static, and a Simon and Garfunkel one began to play -"

 

"Who're Simon and Garfunkel?" Ron asked.

 

"A famous group from my mom and dad's time," Hermione answered him. "I'm sure you've heard at least one of their songs." She started to sing "The Boxer" for him, but Ron continued to look back at her, nonplussed. "OK, never mind," she said. "Go on, Harry."

 

But Harry had just remembered something else and did not immediately answer. He had already felt sure, from the content of the lyrics, that the song had been pointing toward Jill Merona, but now he recalled something else from their visit to her house that added to his theory. "She had a Simon and Garfunkel CD in her house," Harry said. In his excitement, he gestured to his side as he played through the memory of walking into her living room. "It was sitting on top of that entertainment center as we walked into the living room." 

 

Now both Hermione and Ron were looking unconvinced. "So what does that have to do with the case?" Ron said.

 

"I think it was a supernatural thing, like with the TV last night," Harry said quickly, trying to spit out his theory before it crumbled into ashes. "I think the girl - Anna's daughter - interrupted the radio station and played this song, and she chose it because she  _knew_ that I'd seen the CD in Jill's house - only I didn't remember that I'd seen it at the time - but the other reason was because the lyrics had something to do with hiding something in the pantry, and I'd bet my right arm that it'll end up explaining why Kathy was in the pantry."

 

Ron massaged his forehead and furrowed his brow, trying to keep up with Harry, and Hermione said, "Wait just a minute, I need more coffee," and briefly left the table. When she returned with steam billowing from her mug, she said, "I know you're talking about 'Mrs. Robinson,' but can you remind me of the lyrics, please?"

 

Harry recited the words as best as he could remember them, and Hermione shook her head. "But that song's about an affair, not about a Squib."

 

"I know!" he said, starting to feel frustrated that they weren't jumping on board with him.  _If they'd been there_ , he thought to himself,  _If they'd felt how creepy and hair-raising that moment was, then they'd know that this was an important clue._ "I know it's about an affair. But one half of the meaning of something is how people interpret it. The song might mean something different to  _her."_

"Are you talking about Kathy or the girl?" Ron asked. 

 

Harry shrugged, though he suspected in his heart that the girl with the hidden face had been behind it. "We already know that Jill keeps Kathy secret," Harry added. "'Not many people know that I have 3 daughters.' Remember?"

 

"Yes, I do remember, Harry," Hermione said, lowering her eyelids as she drank her coffee and speaking to him patiently like a stubborn child. "But I'm sorry; a radio malfunction is not enough proof to pin this on Jill for certain, no matter how horrible she is," Hermione gestured to the papers that she had spread out on the table. "Besides, even if this is the little dead girl speaking to us and trying to point us toward Jill, then how do we know what  _her_  motivations are? We don't know what interest she has in this case, what role she's played already...How do we know that we can trust her? How do we know that  _she's_ not the killer? Also, why would she communicate with you via radio?" Hermione asked. "If she can influence dreams and appear in hotel rooms and whatever else, why couldn't she just come out and  _tell_ you this?"

 

A thought that had occurred to Harry now tentatively slid from his lips. "Maybe she can't speak," he said. Then he remembered her speaking in his dream. "At least not in waking life, or without some kind of aid, like the radio. I don't know." Harry resigned himself to the fact that Hermione and Ron weren't going to take his bait - yet. "I guess we'll have to wait and see if she does anything else. Maybe if she shows up again, you'll have the chance to ask her why she won't do us the kindness of speaking to us, Hermione." Harry tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice and failed.

 

She ignored his snarkiness. "Speaking of waking life, I think I might have had a dream like one of yours last night. Ron told me last night about what happened in yours."

 

"Really?" Harry and Ron asked together eagerly.

 

"Did you see the girl or Anna in it?" Harry added.

 

"No," said Hermione. "In the dream, I was little. It was the first time that I showed my parents that I could do magic. I had levitated a book from the bookcase in front of them. Except in this dream, they reacted differently from how they did in real life. Instead of being proud of me, they were really disturbed. They told me that what I did wasn't magic, that it was something wrong with me, and they'd have to take me to the hospital to be looked at. Then I was in this big, white room, wearing these things on my wrists and being videotaped by a therapist. I felt like an oddity on display. I was little and afraid and wanted to be with my parents, but the therapist said that I couldn't until they found out what was wrong with me. I wasn't able to convince him that what I was doing was magic. I got more and more upset, and then I woke up." 

 

Harry was disappointed. "So why do you think that was like one of our dreams?" 

 

Hermione shivered. "It didn't feel like any other dream I've had. I don't know where I would have drawn that room or scenario from. It felt  _real_ , like how the barn felt real to you," she said to Ron. 

 

Harry nodded slowly, considering Hermione's words. The girl had not shown him a white room or a psychologist yet, but a life was made of many experiences...maybe she had just decided to share that particular experience with Hermione for some reason. 

 

"What about you two? Did you all have dreams?" she asked.

 

"Yeah," said Ron immediately. "Another weird horse dream. In this one, I was also very young. And like yours," Ron said to Hermione, "part of it was a real memory. I had drawn a picture and wanted to show it to Mum, but she was busy brushing and braiding Ginny's hair. I kept trying to get her attention, but she wasn't listening to me at all. And I felt so jealous." He paused and his ears turned a little red. "In real life, what happened next was that when Mum went to the bathroom to find more hair ties, I snuck up behind Ginny, put my pen in the top of her braid - near her scalp - and ripped the pen down the length of her braid. She screamed, it tore some of her hair out and made her scalp bleed, and Mum came running in and gave me a whipping."

 

Hermione looked like she was about to tell Ron off for being a cruel older brother, but Harry was eager to hear about the dream so he headed her off. "What happened in the dream?"

 

"In the dream," Ron continued. "Her face started to get strange and long as Mum continued to brush her. She slowly morphed into a horse, as tall as Mum, but Mum kept brushing her and talking to her like nothing had happened. Then, when Mum left to get more hair ties, I was really afraid, because I didn't know what Ginny the horse would do...and then, like the horses in my other dream, she started to go crazy - like something was burning her - and she ran right for the window. I saw the shards of glass pierce her big, black eyes." Ron grimaced. "Then I woke up."

 

"What about you, Harry?" Hermione said.

 

"I think I saw how the girl died," Harry said, then he retold his own dream to them. When he got to the part about being thrown in the well, the other two gasped in horror. 

 

"How could a mother do that?" Hermione breathed, her eyes wide. None of them could think of a satisfactory answer, and merely sat in morose silence as a girl wearing a Mickey Mouse hat nearby shrieked that she didn't want to eat her eggs. 

 

Ron winced at the noise. "Maybe she was evil?" he suggested. "Maybe she was torturing the family horses or something?"

 

Hermione shook her head, looking pained. "I don't think there is any such thing as an innately evil child. Children do cruel things to lash out when they feel powerless, but that doesn't make them evil."

 

"I don't know," Harry said, trying to suppress a smile. "You didn't grow up with Dudley." 

 

One of the articles that he had read with Dexter suddenly swam to the surface of his memory: _"_ _Mr. and Mrs. Morgan wept for their horses, who they say are like children to them..."_

"You might be onto something, Ron." Harry said slowly. "At least about hurting the horses." He stared at Ron, the second-youngest of his 6 siblings, constantly overshadowed in everything he did - Ron, who understood what it felt to be jealous. "I think you keep having horse dreams because she knows that you relate to her feelings of neglect and jealousy. The Morgans loved those horses like children. And I think the girl was jealous of them. I would be too," he added, "if I had to sleep in a barn loft like that. Like a prisoner." 

 

Harry rested his forehead in his hands as the pieces started to fall together. "The articles said that the horses were sick, that they broke through the barriers and ran to the shore to drown themselves. Maybe somehow the girl was making them sick..."

 

"But how could she do that?" Ron asked. "Especially if she was trapped way up in the barn loft?"

 

Harry and Hermione's eyes met and he knew that she was thinking the same thing. "Maybe she was a witch," Harry said wonderingly. When Ron looked dubious, Harry continued. "She's been communicating with us in dreams based on how we can relate to her. She reached out to me because I know how it feels to be neglected and imprisoned. She reached out to you because you know how it feels to be overlooked and jealous. And with Hermione," he chose words carefully, "She was trying to show what it would be like to have a gift that others fear," he thought of the white room, the hospital that Hermione had described, "a gift that you desperately want your family to be proud of."

 

"But why would she show _me_ that?" Hermione asked. "My family has always been proud of me. It would make more sense to show that to _you_ after what you lived through with the Dursleys."

 

"I don't know," Harry said. "Maybe she can tell how important that support from your family is to you, and she wanted to show you how she experienced the opposite. So that you would feel empathy for her, even though you didn't live the same experiences."

 

Hermione nodded. "So she has some kind of power, magical or otherwise," she said with an air of stitching the facts together. "And she might have used this power to hurt the horses, which led her parents to lock her up and kill her...or maybe they locked her up _first,_ because they were afraid of her, and then she hurt the horses because she was upset and lashing out -"

 

"Hang on, Ron," Harry interrupted. "You said that the horse in your dream was behaving as though it was _burnt_?" 

 

"Yeah," said Ron. "That was basically what it looked like." 

 

"Huh," said Harry. He felt the burn on his arm underneath his shirt. He hadn't shown it to Ron and Hermione, mainly because they had started speculating before he had gotten to the end of his story; but something made him want to keep it to himself, at least for the time being. It felt personal, like a secret between himself and the girl who had said that she knew his pain. The lingering sting of the burn was like a reminder of their shared experiences.

 

Harry's phone vibrated on the table beside his plate of now-cold eggs. He picked it up and looked at the screen. It was a text from Dexter.

 

"Please feel free to join us at the station whenever convenient. Masuka is bursting to tell Hermione what he found to see if his forensic skills match up to hers. Then maybe we could do lunch afterward?  :)"  

 

Harry smiled. "Dexter's invited us down to the station," he told the other two. "Apparently Vince found something." 

 

"I wonder if he got an ID on the skin?" Hermione mused as she stacked her empty plates with theirs. 

 

"Dunno," said Harry. "Let's go check it out and see."

 

 

 


	15. Already Dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the long delay in posting a chapter! Work has been crazy as we are beta-testing new software, and I was also working on another creative project. However, I will not let so much time elapse this time. Also, the end is in sight for this fan-fiction. Probably only 6 chapters or less 'til the end...
> 
> As always, please leave comments/feedback!

Miami Metro Homicide had a wide-open office on the 5th floor of the downtown police headquarters. Harry looked around as they emerged from the silver elevator, taking in detectives who stood grouped around poster boards displaying grisly photographs, detectives who lounged at their desks, eating donuts as they thumbed casually through case files, and other detectives speaking in tense voices over the phone. 

 

Harry was reminded of the first time that he walked through the Auror headquarters at the Ministry with Mr. Weasley, the day of his disciplinary hearing before 5th year. While he had been preoccupied with the fate of his own education on that day, he still remembered his feeling of awe at the buzz of activity, the casual atmosphere, the Aurors so effortlessly going about the work that he dreamed about doing one day...

 

They all spotted Debra first, bent over one of the desks across the room, between Batista and Masuka, who were sitting. She looked up, spotted them, and waved them over eagerly. As they crossed the room to join her, Harry looked around for Dexter. He was not in the open part of the office, but as they walked, Harry heard a door click shut off to his left - he saw Dexter slipping from a small office with blinds covering the windows. When they made eye contact, Dexter smiled shyly and waved a gloved hand.

 

They all met in a group behind Vince. "The water test results came back," Vince announced. He held up a small test tube and showed them. "The minerals present in it indicate that it came from an underground source - freshwater, by the looks of it. But it's also pretty stagnant - you can tell from the amount of dirt in it."

 

"And?" Debra prompted him. She had clearly already heard these results.

 

"The water was also acidic, an indicator of decaying matter."

 

"The water that Kathy's face decayed in?" Batista asked wonderingly.

 

"Who knows?" Vince arched his eyebrows and shrugged.

 

Ron and Harry exchanged looks. After his dream last night, Harry thought he might know _where_ the water came from - the well. But that didn't explain how it had ended up in Kathy's house. Unless the dead girl was somehow the assailant...But why?

 

"What about the skin?" Hermione asked. "Any results on that?"

 

"The DNA was long degraded," Vince said. "Impossible to run a test on it. For all we can tell, it came from someone who was..."

 

"Already dead," finished Harry. He didn't know how he felt at the idea of the dead girl being the killer. He supposed that it confirmed Dexter's original suspicion, but now that they were facing evidence that she had been directly implicated in Kathy's murder, he found himself feeling betrayed, reluctant to accept the information before him. She had shown him parts of her life, she had made him sympathize with her - he didn't want to accept that this girl was evil. 

 

"...maybe the killer was carrying a trophy from a past murder?" Batista was saying. "Like maybe a skin mask, or something."

 

Debra squinted her face in disgust. "Thanks for that visual, Batista."

 

"What?" Batista said indignantly. "It's happened before. That would explain why there was decayed skin at the scene. In any case, it's a lead we can look into. Deb and Vince, I want you to look up taxidermists, tailors - anyone who might be skilled at sewing skin together or working with dead things. Let's check for names that are close to Kathy's address, maybe round up some interviews."

 

Vince and Debra agreed to get to work, and Batista and Dexter walked with Ron, Hermione, and Harry toward the elevators at the end of the office. 

 

"Shall we have another meeting at the crime scene tonight to shift through the rest of those drawings and papers?" Batista asked Ron. 

 

Ron looked surprised to be asked for his opinion, but then he seemed to remember that he had been the one to bring up the sketches at the last meeting. "Sure, sounds good to me," he said.

 

"All right, let's do 5:00 then," Batista said.

 

"Oh - Sarge," Dexter said. "Is it all right if I take my lunch now?"

 

"Yes, that's fine," Batista said. "Just make sure you have the blood report for this murder on my desk before the end of the day."

 

"Will do," said Dexter. With a meaningful look at Harry, he pressed the down button on the elevator. 

 

Harry told Ron and Hermione that he'd see them at the crime scene later. Then he caught up with Dexter in the parking lot. Dexter started the car as Harry climbed into the passenger seat. The sound of upbeat salsa music filled the car. Somehow, it made Harry think of sex, or maybe it was the sly half-smile on Dexter's face that made him suspect that he had more than food planned for their lunch date.


	16. The Tape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I'm terrible! It's been forever. But I promise that I will finish this fic! Pinky swear.  
> As always, thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Harry had never taken a shower with a lover before. Now that he had experienced it, he numbered the lateness of the event among his regrets - Hogwarts's prefect bath-tub, with its jeweled taps that spouted bubbles and water jets of many colors and patterns, would have been a magnificent place to have that experience. 

 

All the same, he was glad to have shared his first lover-bathing experience with a darkly-smiling man in a cramped and thoroughly non-magical bathroom. Moving together, feeling the mingled pleasure of their bodies brushing each other and the hot water, he had felt a quiet bliss. 

 

He had breathed in the fragrant steam rising from Dexter's skin as he bit the man's shoulder. Humming with pleasure, Dexter had reached around, gripped Harry around the shoulders and lower abdomen - once Harry realized what Dexter was doing, he lifted his legs and wrapped them around Dexter's waist - then, with Harry completely off of the ground, Dexter lowered him gently to the bottom of the tub, and then followed after with kisses to Harry's jaw, collarbone, the center of his chest, his navel...soon Harry was unable to keep track of his own anatomy, his mind was flooded with pleasure and the water from the shower was falling gently but not unpleasantly on his face.

 

These solemn moments of lovemaking were also punctuated by silliness. They took advantage of the shower's good acoustics to sing their school songs for each other's benefit. Dexter sang his college's Alma Mater and Harry sang Hogwarts's school song. Dexter almost slipped and fell against the faucet due to how hard he was laughing at the fact that Harry's school was named Hogwarts.

 

Shortly afterward, they were driving across town to the crime scene. They would be a little early, but Harry was glad - he secretly felt that the ghost might be more likely to give them some kind of clue if they were alone. Harry wondered if Dexter felt the same way. 

 

As they cruise-controlled down the palm tree-lined parkway, they munched on taquitos that they had purchased from 7-Eleven, washing them down with a 3-flavor Slurpee.

 

"I'm surprised you eat this stuff," said Harry. "I had you pegged as more of a 'kale and banana smoothie' type guy."

 

Dexter furrowed his brow in a look of confused bewilderment. "Why?"

 

"I don't know," said Harry. "I mean, you're strong and seem healthy." Harry augmented his British accent to the best of his ability. "You seem like a strapping young lad! I figured you probably had to eat a strict diet to stay that way."

 

Dexter shook his head. "No, Deb's always been jealous of me because I'm one of those people who can eat anything and never gain weight. I used to come home from school and eat almost a whole box of macaroni and cheese as a snack before dinner." He laughed. "I remember how pissed off she would get about it."

 

Harry laughed as they turned off the highway onto Kathy's street. "I guess I'm kind of the same way," he said. "I've always been a beanpole. It's annoying that I can't beef up like some guys."

 

"There's not a spell for that?" Dexter grinned as he climbed out of the car and shut the door. Harry stuck out his tongue at him.

 

Once again, walking through Kathy's brown front door felt like leaving one world - warm, steamy, sunny Miami - and entering another - cold, mysterious, and pulsing with the supernatural. As Harry walked through the living room where everything had happened, he tried to imagine the nameless dead girl, Anna's daughter, into existence, tried to will her to tell them what had happened and why she had been there...

 

"Her name's Samara, by the way," Dexter said suddenly. He turned on the light, scattering the shadows of the furniture in the room.

 

"Who?" asked Harry, thrown off guard and still tangled in his thoughts.

 

"The girl. Anna's daughter. Well," Dexter made a contradictory gesture. " _Adoptive_ daughter. That might be another reason she reached out to me the way she did, since we have that in common." 

 

"How did you find this out?"

 

"The databases, of course. Her adoption certificate is right there on file, as well as her and her mother's combined mental health file."

 

Harry, who had been walking around the shattered table so that he could inspect the TV, turned around, startled. "What?"

 

"Yeah," said Dexter, taking a seat at one of the island counter's chairs. "They were both checked into Eola County Psychiatric around the same time. Anna was in pretty bad shape, having hallucinations all the time- apparently pretty unsure of the distinction between fiction and reality. Richard Morgan claimed that Samara was doing it."

 

A feeling of understanding started to expand within Harry's heart. Now the meaning of Hermione's dream was starting to unfold for him.

 

"It seemed that Samara wasn't entirely in control of her power. She said that she used it sometimes to try to communicate when her feelings were overwhelming, but other times, it was like she was a sort of unwilling antenna for psychic activity." Dexter reached down and pulled out a piece of paper. "Take a look at this."

 

Harry walked into the kitchen and looked at Dexter's paper. It seemed to be a photocopy of a picture burned into some kind of filmy paper. The image showed a steep shaft in the ground and what looked like a limp doll lying at the bottom with x's over her eyes. Standing on the ground above the shaft was a pair of giant feet, facing away. 

 

"She made this when she was in the hospital." Dexter said. "Apparently she was getting some kind of impression of what was coming." 

 

"How did she make it?" Harry asked.

 

Dexter furrowed his brow, trying to remember. "The medical notes called it something like, 'projected thermography.' Burning images into things. Apparently she could do this with solid things but also minds."

 

"Or skin," Harry said absentmindedly. When Dexter looked inquiringly at him, Harry rolled up his sleeve and showed him the hand print on his forearm, then explained his dream from the night before. Very gently, Dexter took Harry's pale arm in his brown hands and stroked the burn.

 

"Does it still hurt you?" he asked.

 

"Not really," Harry said. "Just feels hot, like a sunburn." After a pause, he asked. "So, why did they check out of the hospital? Did the psychic stuff get better?"

 

"No," said Dexter. "After a while, Richard Morgan requested for the sessions to be terminated. At the time, he stated that he had it under control."

 

"So he put her in the barn," Harry said slowly, piecing it all together. "And then, whether she was doing it on purpose or not, her feelings started to affect the horses. They broke out of the barn and drowned. And then Anna killed her." Harry was silent for a moment. "It seems like a sad, self-fulfilling prophecy."

 

"What's that?" Dexter asked. 

 

"She got visions from the future of being killed, which caused people around her to hallucinate terrible things and consequently want to kill her," Harry made a circular motion with one hand, bringing it around in the air and touching it to his other hand, to indicate that Samara's visions of being killed had come full circle. As his hands touched, closing the circle, he vividly saw the ring of light behind his eyelids, the thin circle formed by the closed lid of the well.

 

"You OK?" Dexter said.

 

Harry gave his head a shake and blinked again. Now when he blinked, he just saw the normal, bloody red of his eyelids. "Yeah, I'm fine," he said. "Was just thinking of something from my dream last night."

 

"Well, let me run to the bathroom real quick and then we can talk about it more," Dexter said. He left the kitchen and padded down the dark hallway, his feet making rustling noises on the plastic wrap. 

 

When Harry heard the bathroom door close behind Dexter, he knew a moment of anxiety very similar to the feeling you get when you're left alone and expected to converse with someone you don't know. Except that this feeling was also tinged with the fear of the unknown. Harry felt sure that the girl - Samara - was watching him, that she might choose this quiet moment to communicate with him, but he wasn't sure how...and the idea of seeing her still filled him with a strange, nameless fear.

 

His knees trembling a little, he walked out of the kitchen and re-entered the living room. The crime scene. Stepping carefully, he walked to the back of the couch and placed his hands on it. Then he glanced quickly all around him, in case she was standing hidden in one of the corners of the room or in the dark hallway.

 

It was in that moment, while he was glancing around, that he heard a metallic whine and click, a machinal burp, from in front of him. He faced forward again just in time to see a VHS tape eject itself halfway from the VCR.  

 

Immediately, he strode over to the television and knelt in front of it, its convex, pregnant black screen straining toward him. He slid the tape out, held it in his hands like a doctor holding a delivered child - but unlike a newborn, slick and greasy with blood and afterbirth, the tape was a silent, black, clean box. Harry flipped it over in his hands, examining it for any trace of where it had come from. There was no label on it, not even a sticky note tacked on by somebody who had made a home-made recording. 

_Could this have anything to do with Kathy's death?_ Harry wondered. What would he find if he watched it? Family videos, a sex tape, or something more sinister? 

 

His hands shaking slightly with nervousness, he gently eased the tape back into the VCR, which whined gratefully as it accepted the gift.

 

He turned the television on to raging static. He hurriedly hit play on the VCR and the static changed to a black screen, interrupted once by a flicker. Just when he was about to give up on the tape and conclude that it must be damaged, the screen changed: suddenly he found himself face-to-face with the ring of light from his dream, accompanied by what he could only call a blood-curdling noise.

 

He settled back on his knees, captivated, as the ring of light flickered and the noise continued. Then everything dissolved and the scene changed into a churning fountain of blood.

 

And then Anna Morgan appeared. She looked just the same as she had in Harry's dream, her face reflected in an oval mirror as she brushed her hair. The only difference was that he could not see the bookshelves full of trophies that he knew must be on either side of the camera, because this time he was not looking through his own eyes, but someone else's.

 

Almost on cue with that thought, a mirror appeared on the opposite side of the screen, showing Samara, her face half-hidden by hair, walking away. In her own mirror, Anna's reflection looked over to Samara's side of the screen, but the scene changed again before Harry could discern her expression. Was it fondness? Worry? Fear?

 

Many other images passed before Harry's eyes, some that he recognized from his dreams and others that he did not. There was the sad chair that he'd seen in the barn loft, the hillside with the tree that he had seen near the well. During this scene, there was a fly seemingly crawling on the screen where the sky was (except Harry was close enough to the screen to see that the fly was _not_ crawling on the screen, but was part of the video... _how strange..._ ). Then there was a shot of a very tall ladder, leaning against a non-descript wall. The sounds and violence of the images intensified. A mass of people, maggots, a millipede crawling from beneath a table - a box of fingers, twitching - the tree, burning - dead horses washing onto a beach - a metallic, ear-splitting keening that made Harry's hair stand up on his arms. 

 

Then there was Anna, facing away, falling forward.  _She committed suicide?_ Harry thought. Her fall was accompanied by similar imagery that seemed to underscore the finality of her death: the tall ladder clattering to the ground, the lid of the well closing. 

 

The last scene of the tape was a rather far-away shot of a clearing, with what Harry recognized as a well in the center of it. Just the night before, his knees had bumped up against those stones, he had clutched the edges, and then looked down into the seemingly bottomless depths of that hole. The tape lingered long on this scene. He waited for something to happen, but then the screen was devoured in static and he understood that the message was complete.  _Now what?_

His pocket buzzed. Disoriented, he stabbed the Off button on the television with his finger and then fished his phone out of his pocket, looking at the caller ID.  _Unknown caller - WA._  Harry suppressed a shiver. What a strange coincidence. Why would someone in Washington state be calling him now? Could this possibly have something to do with the fact that he had just watched a tape made by a dead girl from Washington state...?

 

On the fourth ring, he swiped right to receive the call. He felt a chill or some other kind of repulsion as he raised the phone to his ear, like something dreadful was about to spill from it. He sensed the one at the end of the line waiting for him to put the phone to his face, as though they could see him. It was the most self-conscious he had ever felt when receiving a phone call. 

 

Before he could summon the courage to speak, a little voice whispered to him across the line, "Seven days." 

 

It was her. The same girl who had said in his dream, "I know your pain, Harry Potter." What was she telling him now?

 

"W-what?" Harry stammered. But it was too late: the line was dead. 

 

He switched the phone off and set it on the floor, then rocked back from his heels onto his bottom. He couldn't shake a strange feeling of infection, as though something filthy was coursing through his veins. He lifted his gaze to the black screen of the television. As his eyes drifted over the reflected room, he received a shock - there was a column of shadow behind the couch, but Harry realized it was more than that when he saw bone-white hands clenched on the couch just in front of it. It was Samara, and the column of shadow was hair, covering her face. She was in the room, watching him, standing right behind him.

 

He whipped around, still seated on the floor, and saw no one behind the couch. Footsteps from the hallway made him jerk his head in that direction, but it was only Dexter, returning from the bathroom. 

 

Dexter, noticing immediately that something was wrong, hurried around the side of the couch and sat on the floor beside Harry. "What happened?"

 

"Dunno," Harry said breathlessly. He hit the Eject button on the VCR and the tape slid out into his hand. "When you went to the bathroom, this popped out of the VCR, and I just pushed it in and watched it and..." he hesitated. 

 

"What was on it?" Dexter asked with interest.

 

"Images from Samara's life. Some from my dreams, others new...I think it's supposed to be the story of what happened to her. Anna was in it - she threw herself off a cliff. Did you read anything about -?"

 

Dexter hastened to answer, "Forgot to mention that to you! As I was reading through more of Anna's articles last night, I found her obituary. She died in her forties - from suicide, jumping into the sea. Do you think she did it out of remorse for killing Samara?" 

 

The way he said remorse was strange, as though he was handling a foreign concept beyond his comprehension. After hearing Dexter self-identify as a sociopath, Harry realized that maybe Dexter had never felt genuine remorse when killing people.

 

"Maybe," Harry said. "Though why kill her, then? How do you just do something like that without realizing that you're going to regret it afterwards?"

 

Dexter shrugged. "I want to know more about her motive," Harry said. "I want to talk to Richard Morgan if he's still alive. Did you see an obit for him?"

 

"No," said Dexter. "But go back to your story - what happened after the tape stopped?"

 

Harry told Dexter how he had heard Samara's voice on the other end of the line telling him, "Seven days," how he now felt strange, as though the viewing of the videotape and the confirmation call had changed him. "What does seven days mean?" he asked.

 

"I don't know," Dexter said slowly, looking worried. "You don't think it could mean..."

 

Neither of them said it. 

 

"Do you want to bet that someone gave Kathy this tape roughly...ah...a week before she turned up dead in her pantry?" Harry suggested. He tried to sound light-hearted about it, but his stomach was in knots. He knew from his education in the magical world that no spell could reverse or otherwise interrupt the machinations of death...if he had just received a death-curse, then there was not much that he could do about it - at least not with magic

 

Dexter looked very troubled. "I should see it, too," he said, reaching for the tape. "I might be able to figure something out -"

 

Automatically, Harry pulled his hand out of reach. "I can't do that, Dexter. Not until we find out more about it."

 

"I can  _help_ you," Dexter insisted. 

 

Harry shook his head and Dexter bowed his own, a look of pain crossing his face.

 

"Don't worry," Harry said. "We'll figure it out. Kathy didn't just  _have_ this tape. Someone must have given it to her, which means that that someone must know more about it. If they're alive, then that must mean there's a way..." He gripped Dexter's shoulder reassuringly. "I'll be OK."

 

Dexter smiled weakly, not altogether reassured. 

 

"Can you show me the suicide article if you have it?" Harry asked.

 

"Sure," said Dexter, springing to his feet and walking back to the kitchen. He returned a moment later holding a binder full of the articles. "Here it is." 

 

The article contained a picture of a man with gray hair and a world-weary face. His expression was ugly with anger and he was shutting what appeared to be the front door of his house. The title of the article was, "Richard Morgan Refuses to Answer Questions on Wife's Suicide."

 

Harry scanned the article.  _Morgan has been cleared as a suspect, as he has had Moesko Islanders testify to his presence at several events on the day of Mrs. Morgan's suicide...seems to have jumped from a cliff on the mainland, a short distance away from a horse pasture owned by Mr. H. F. Holloway...Mr. Holloway has also been cleared by the police after providing an alibi and stating that he does not recall seeing Mrs. Morgan on his property...a short time ago, Mrs. Morgan was being treated for depression and hallucinations at Eola County Psychiatric..._

"I need to speak with him," Harry said. 

 

"Who?" Dexter asked. 

 

"Richard Morgan."

 

Dexter flicked through the sheaf of papers in his binder and produced one with a circled address. "Here's his last known address," he said. "No phone number listed, so you'd probably have to actually go there."

 

"Good thing I can Apparate," Harry smiled.

 

Dexter still looked concerned. "Why does she want to kill people?" he asked.

 

"She may not  _want_ to," Harry said immediately. "When people are killed in terrible ways, a vengeful spirit is often born. The agony of their death is transformed into a curse, often cyclical in nature, that forces all those who come into contact with it to experience the ghost's agony. A lot of times, the ghost doesn't even have control over this."

 

"How do you  _know_ this?"

 

"After my godfather died, I talked to one of the ghosts at Hogwarts for a long time about these kinds of things. I wanted to know if Sirius would come back. Nicholas - the ghost - told me that he wouldn't come back...and he later told me that I should be glad that he wouldn't. Moving on is far more peaceful than staying behind and being stuck in the rut of a curse, like he was. Nicholas's curse didn't really affect anyone else except for him, but Samara was quite powerful even when she was alive...that might explain how her death spawned a curse that managed to travel so far from where she lived."

 

Dexter looked skeptical. "I think you are going out of your way not to hold her responsible. She was hurting people even when she was alive."

 

"She was a troubled kid," Harry acknowledged. "She was a troubled kid with power. Kids do spiteful things even when they don't have powers like that, when they feel weak or small or afraid. But a kid acting out doesn't deserve a death sentence."

 

The clock in the corner struck the hour and Harry jumped. It rang dully and sorrowfully 5 times. 

 

"Everyone will be here soon," Harry said, standing up in a hurry. "Tell them that I had to go investigate another lead and that I'll be back this evening."

 

"You're going to Moesko Island by yourself?" Dexter asked, looking worried.

 

"Yes, I want to figure out what's going on as soon as possible." Harry was painfully aware of the clock ticking as he felt in his pockets to make sure that he had his wand. In his left hand, he still held the videotape. Distractedly, he moved forward and landed in Dexter's arms.

 

"Be careful," Dexter said, his face a mask of grimness. 

 

Harry said that he would be, and then, taking note of the address on the paper that Dexter had given him, he turned into the crushing darkness of Apparition and hurtled toward the Pacific coast.


	17. A Tale of Two Fathers: Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another long-ish one! Thoughts/comments are all appreciated!

When Harry took a breath again, he felt salty air whipping his face. He opened his eyes onto a gray and bleak but beautiful landscape. The ground was flat and he could see the sea in the near distance between waving trees. A gentle rain fell on the pavement and grumbling thunderclouds promised more to come. 

 

Harry turned and saw a lonely farmhouse on the road. He couldn't see any other houses on either side of it for some distance down the road. _This must be a sparsely populated island_.

 

He walked across a sort of bridge driveway that led onto the property. An empty, fenced-in field stretched away on his left. Harry wondered if any horses ever still grazed there, or if Richard Morgan had stopped keeping them. 

 

The barn, stables, and even the farmhouse itself were in a mildewing state of disrepair. As he drew nearer to the house, a simple tree swing caught Harry's attention. One of the ropes stretching down from the tree was wearing thin from age, and the swing moved slightly in the wind, as though a child had just dismounted. Moving over to touch the rope of the swing, Harry looked up at the house and received a shock.

 

He found himself looking at a moment from the videotape he had just watched. The perspective of the camera had been close to where he now stood, and the scene had taken in the upper floor of the farmhouse, from which a vaguely menacing face had watched from a window. Now that window was covered with a curtain. He wondered if Richard Morgan was as rough of a person as he appeared in pictures and video. Harry remembered what Dexter had suggested about Samara being evil, and then considered that perhaps Mr. Morgan's menacing appearance in the window was due to perspective...or rather, due to willful manipulation of the audience's perspective...

 

"Excuse me. Can I help you?" Harry jumped and looked around. Richard Morgan was standing on the path that led over from the fenced pasture. He peeled off work gloves, placed his hands on his hips aggressively, and planted his feet. This stance, paired with the angry look on his heavy-browed face, made Harry feel like a child caught in wrong-doing.

 

"Mr. Morgan?" he said tentatively.

 

"Yeah, that's me," Richard Morgan said gruffly. "Now kindly let me know why you're on my property."

 

"I need to ask you some questions about -"

 

"You a reporter?" Morgan interrupted, watching Harry warily.

 

Harry held up his hands. "No, I'm just a normal guy. And look, I'm sorry that I'm barging in, but it's kind of urgent. There's been a murder in Miami, and I think -"

 

Again, Morgan interrupted, his brows furrowed in confusion. "Miami? What does Miami have to do with me?"

 

Harry plunged on, determined not to be interrupted again. "We found a videotape in the victim's house. We have reason to believe that this tape was made by your daughter."

 

Immediately, without pause, Morgan said, "I don't have a daughter." His voice was calm and low when he said it, but Harry could see his lip curling. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave my property." Morgan turned on his heel and had slammed the door of his farmhouse behind him within seconds, leaving Harry standing in the rain beside the child's swing that made Morgan's lie all the more sad and ridiculous.

 

Harry sighed and rolled up his sleeves. He didn't like to force people when he could help it, but Richard Morgan was an angry, stubborn old man. He didn't have much choice.

 

In the space of five minutes, Harry had entered the Morgan house, "convinced" Richard Morgan to drink some Veritaserum, and had him sit down at the kitchen table.

 

Under the influence of the truth-telling potion, Morgan's face had relaxed. Now, instead of angry, it merely looked sad and tired.

 

Harry, satisfied that Morgan would now cooperate, stood in the kitchen and walked around a little, examining his surroundings. "What is your daughter's name?" Harry asked.

 

"Samara," Morgan said in a monotone.

 

"Did you adopt her?"

 

"Yes. My wife couldn't conceive. Miscarriages." In addition to the monotone, sometimes the Veritaserum caused people to speak in fragments.

 

"Where did you find her?"

 

"Orphanage. On the mainland. They'd taken her from her birth mother. Something wrong with her, the mother. She'd tried to hurt the child. Maybe..."

 

"Maybe what?"

 

"Maybe that's why she was...ruined."

 

"Samara?" Harry asked sharply, looking over his shoulder.

 

Morgan gazed morosely into space. His eyes seemed to focus on a point outside the kitchen. "Yes," he said.

 

Harry hurried over to Morgan's other side and gazed in the same direction to see what he was looking at. Again, he felt an almost physically-abrasive thrill of recognition: the oval mirror. Even more eerily, he knew which mirror it was. There were two in the video - the one in which Anna appeared, and the one in which Samara appeared, walking away. This was Samara's mirror. He didn't know how he knew - they looked the same - but it was hers in the video that he recalled, not Anna's mirror that had appeared in his dream. He wondered where in the house Anna's mirror was.

 

"What do you mean, she was ruined?" Harry asked.

 

"She was different from other children. Very introverted. Never cried as a baby. But then, as she grew older, she got more anxious, more withdrawn, unreachable. It was around that time that Anna started to show the strain."

 

"She started seeing things?" Harry asked.

 

Morgan nodded. Harry was surprised and a little embarrassed to see a tear roll from one of Morgan's sad eyes. He felt that he should look away.

 

"Do you think Samara did it on purpose?" Harry asked.

 

Morgan thought about it for a while. "Sometimes," he said. Harry remembered how Samara's file had reported that she had been in control of her power sometimes, but other times not. "Once she found out she could do it, she tried to use it to communicate sometimes. She wanted us to be proud of her for it, since other children couldn't do it. But even when she showed good things, it still isn't good...not to know what's real or not. That eats away at you after a while. All of a sudden your world - everything - interrupted by whatever she wanted to show you. All because she wasn't good at using her words. She didn't speak at all until she was four."

 

"Really?" Harry said, surprised.

 

Morgan nodded. "Even after that, she kind of spoke in fragments. We had a speech therapist for her, but that never panned out..."

 

"You mean because Samara died?"

 

Morgan looked over at him, a look of vague bemusement on his face. "You know that for sure?"

 

"You don't?" Harry countered, incredulous.

 

Morgan looked away again, now at his refrigerator. Harry noticed how, unlike most refrigerators, it was bereft of magnets, photographs, and other decorations. He wondered if it had once held pictures of his family. "I've always assumed that's what happened," he said in a dead voice, utterly devoid of grief. "They never found her body, though."

 

 _She's still in the well_. How long had it been now? 20, 30 years? Was there even a body - even a skeleton left? 

 

Changing the subject for now, Harry asked, "What was it like, when she used her powers?"

 

Morgan sighed. Rain drummed on the window over the table. "Some times were more extreme than others. For example, we'd pick up her mood, too - not just images. So if I sent her to her room for misbehaving, sometimes I'd get this awful stomach-ache for no reason, and feel terrible for the rest of the day. And it turned out that I was picking up her mood from being pissed at me."

 

"Stomach-ache?" Harry interrupted. "Why would you feel a stomach-ache?"

 

Some of Morgan's brusque manner returned as he retorted, "Where do _you_ usually feel it when you're angry or resentful about something?"

 

Harry pondered this. Normally, if he was angry, he was focused on the conceptual triggers for his anger and not on the physical effects in his body, and so his thoughts were in his own head. However, as he mentally examined _all_ of the sensations that he had experienced the last time that he was angry - during his last row with Ginny - he could now isolate and identify the physical component of his anger, which felt like a rough curdling in his stomach.

 

"You noticed the physical aspect because you had _no reason_ to be angry yourself," Morgan explained. "And it wasn't just anger. If she was sad, I'd feel a weight in my chest and start to feel depressed myself. If she was frightened, my heart would speed up...And then there were the more extreme times."

 

"What was a more extreme example?" Harry prodded, eager for more information.

 

"Even when she was dreaming, it would happen," Morgan said vaguely. "There was one time when I went in the barn to get some tools, and I knew she was sleeping because it was peaceful in there. The horses were resting. There were no noises from up there." He gazed at the ceiling and Harry knew that he was imagining Samara's room in the barn loft. 

 

"The whole atmosphere was just a lot more relaxed than it usually was when she was awake. Anyway, I was standing near my tools. I leaned down to grab some of them, and then one of her visions took me. She must have been dreaming - all of a sudden I was in a boat, pitching down the rapids of this river - the boat was lurching from the roughness of the water - and then I was back in the real world with a pain like nothing I've ever felt in my eye." Morgan raised a hand to the bottom of his right eyelid. Harry could now see that there was an ugly scar there, a slash. 

 

"While I'd been in the vision, I'd fallen forward and landed on one of my tools - it had pierced right through my eyelid." Harry winced. "I had to go to the hospital and get stitches." Morgan was quiet for a moment. "It was just hard, having an anxious child. As if that wouldn't make you anxious enough by itself, we were feeling horrible all of the time because _she_ was feeling bad. It was a vicious cycle. I'm sure there were times when we were unnecessarily...ugly...to each other because of how we felt."

 

"So what do you think happened to her?" Harry asked. Though of course _he_ already knew, he thought he'd be able to learn something about Anna's motive from what her husband thought.

 

"I think Anna killed her." Morgan said slowly. Harry was surprised. Did he have such little faith in his wife?

 

"Why do you think that?" Harry asked.

 

"Partially her suicide," Morgan said, tilting his head to the side. "I figured that was her response to having done something that she couldn't live with."

 

"You said, 'partially.' What else?"

 

"She left me, just before she did it," Morgan said. "Once she'd recuperated some, she got angry with me, as though all of this had been my fault. She was particularly angry that I had put Samara in the barn. She'd thought that Samara was still at the hospital, getting treated. It probably didn't help that I'd lied to her about that." 

 

"Why _did_ you stop Samara's treatment?" Harry asked.

 

"It wasn't helping her any. In fact, she was getting worse - more anxious, more clammed up - being in a strange place with strange people. I thought it would be a kindness to take her home, but I still had to keep her away from Anna until we figured out what to do. Anna had already tried to commit suicide once or twice at that point, that's how out of it she was.

 

"Anyway," Morgan continued. "Anna was angry at me when she found out that Samara was in the barn, and she wasn't accepting my explanations. So she packed up, took Samara, and left. I think her initial plan was to go to the mainland and stay with her parents for a while in Oregon. 

 

"Then, one day later, I got a voicemail. It was Anna, I could tell, but she was crying so hard that she was unintelligible. I could only make out one phrase, over and over: 'What have we done? What have we done?'"

 

"What was that about?" Harry asked.

 

Morgan allowed his hands to slide off the table and folded them in his lap. "Ever since the hospital, Samara wasn't the same. Like I said, it made her worse. I think she felt like we had abandoned her there. It broke her trust in us. I think Anna was upset because she saw how severely that had hurt Samara, how their relationship wasn't the same anymore, and she blamed herself. Like she thought she should have been stronger so that they wouldn't have had to go to the hospital. In any case, it was that same day that she committed suicide."

 

"So," said Harry, "You think she was so distraught about Samara's condition that she decided to kill Samara and then herself?" 

 

"I think," said Morgan, "that she couldn't bear to see a reminder, right in front of her, of her failings as a parent. After we adopted Samara, being a good mom was all that mattered to her. And then when she saw that she had failed at that, she just...broke." Morgan's cracked lips looked blue in the light from the rain-washed window. He reminded Harry of a corpse. "I think she wanted to get rid of the evidence of her failure as a parent, and of course that was Samara. Samara's power was also affecting her, probably, making her less reasonable than normal. And then afterwards, I think she realized what she had done, and so she jumped."

 

Harry and Morgan sat quietly for a few moments and listened to the rain. Harry wondered if the Veritaserum had started to wear off yet. He figured that he should modify Morgan's memory and leave before it did wear off, since Morgan would likely become aggressive again.

 

"Do you want to see her ashes?" Morgan asked unexpectedly, in the same melancholy voice.

 

"What? Oh, sure," Harry said, taken aback by the volunteered gesture. Maybe Morgan had warmed up to Harry after getting to unload his family tragedy on him. Harry stood up and followed Morgan through a closed door between a counter and the dishwasher. They walked up a few dusty steps in a hallway, and then turned left through another doorway.

 

Again, Harry swooned. He was standing in the dark library-like room from his dream, with the oval mirror facing him from the wall in the next room. On either side of him were shelves of books, photographs, and dusty horse trophies. Harry's eyes scanned through all of the photographs - Anna smiled out of every one, her face young and full - not haggard as she had been in his dreams. Morgan did not have any pictures of Samara displayed.

 

Morgan had walked a few feet ahead of Harry and was already standing by the mirror and a desk beneath it. Harry walked slowly over to join him, and Morgan pulled out the center drawer of the desk. Inside the shallow drawer was a hairbrush, some perfume and medicine bottles, papers, and an ornate wooden box. Anna's name was spelled out on the box in golden letters.

 

Morgan set the box on top of the table and lifted the lid. Harry peered inside and saw the bag full of dark gray ash. He did not know what to say, so he continued looking with a subdued expression. 

 

"She wanted to be cremated," Morgan said matter-of-factly. "She thought that fire would be clean and - proper, and she could be kept by family. She always said she couldn't imagine anything worse than being in the ground, rotting in the dark, away from family." Morgan's hands shook as he closed the box again and even Harry felt close to tears.

 

After another silent moment, Harry asked, "Did you know that Samara was still using her powers after her death? Did you know that she had made a videotape and that this house is in it?"

 

Still looking down so as to avert his red eyes from Harry, Morgan shook his head. "No," he said. He replaced the box in the drawer and picked up one of Anna's perfumes, raising the bottle to his nostrils and sniffing it with his eyes closed. "But it does not surprise me. For a long time, I've felt like my life is just this sad movie." 


	18. Interlude of Images

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back with another update from this weird fan-fiction combination! Truly nearing the end of the fic now, another three chapters or so. As always, grateful for comments and notes from readers!

By the time that Harry left Richard Morgan's house, he had received a message from Hermione. 

"We're back at the hotel. Come meet us here when you're done with your lead." 

 

So he turned on the bridge driveway to the farmhouse and felt the crushing darkness of Apparition cover him again. He landed hard on his feet in the middle of the hotel room and saw Hermione, sitting on the bed, jump at his sudden appearance.

 

"Finally, there you are!" she said eagerly. "Where have you been?"

 

"Where's Ron?" Harry asked.

 

The toilet in the next room flushed and Hermione inclined her head in that direction. Within moments, Ron had joined them in the main room. "Bloody hell, was starting to worry about you, mate!" Ron exclaimed, sitting beside Hermione on the bed. "What've you been up to?"

 

Sitting on the edge of his own bed, Harry showed them the VHS tape and told them everything that he'd learned from Dexter and Mr. Morgan about Samara, as well as his suspicion that the tape was a death curse. 

 

Hermione looked worried. "I'd bet anything that this tape is what killed Kathy," she said. "She must have gotten it from someone and then she probably watched it -"

 

"One week before she turned up dead in the pantry," Harry finished. Hermione looked grimly back at him.

 

Ron's reaction was different from what Harry had expected. "But Harry, you know better than anyone not to handle a Muggle artifact that has traces of magical tampering. Hasn't Dad been telling us all that since we were kids? Didn't you learn anything from what happened to Ginny?" 

 

Hermione, always quick to criticize recklessness, took Ron's side. "Ron's right, Harry. What were you thinking?" 

 

"I don't know," Harry shook his head, overwhelmed. "I guess I just didn't think that she would  _do_ that...so far, every time she's appeared, it's just been to communicate. I guess that I let my guard down and wasn't expecting to be cursed."

 

"Well, we won't let it take its full course," Hermione said decisively. "According to what I've read about death curses, there is almost always a way to either undo them entirely or at least to save individuals from them. If the curse was born from murder, then usually that resolution has to do with any strong, outstanding emotions or unresolved tasks that the victim had at the time of her death."

 

"And in the meantime, I can take that tape to Dad, and he can examine it and let us know if we're missing anything," Ron said. He reached out his hand for the tape.

 

Harry hesitated, not wanting to hand over something this dangerous so easily. "You mustn't watch it," Harry told Ron, "Nor let your dad watch it, either." 

 

Ron smiled. "How thick do you think I am?"

 

Harry smiled back. "I guess not as thick as me," he replied. He passed the tape to Ron.

 

Perhaps Ron sensed the worry behind his joke, because he deliberately sought out Harry's eyes and said, "We're not going to let you die, mate. We've made it this far past every kind of foul thing imaginable...we're not going to be beaten by this little, flimsy black box." He flicked the tape with his finger before setting it on the bedside table.

 

"Ron, show Harry what we found earlier," Hermione prompted Ron suddenly.

 

"Oh yeah, look at this," said Ron, reaching behind him. He dropped a small pile of paper into Harry's lap. They were all drawings. "All of the wacky shit that Kathy was apparently drawing before her death," Ron commentated. 

 

Harry shifted aside the picture he had already seen of Anna Morgan, standing before the mirror. He felt excited as he recognized more moments from the videotape. "She definitely watched the tape, too," Harry said eagerly to Ron and Hermione. 

 

"Here's the millipede beneath the table, the horses washing up on the beach" - Hermione, looking horrified, said, " _That's_ what that is?" - "and here, the outside of the Morgan house. Wow, she was really good at drawing, this looks just like it," Harry said, admiring the picture. He set this one aside and winced. "And the finger getting punctured..."

 

"That was in the tape, too?" Ron asked, his face slightly nauseated.

 

Harry nodded, then stopped short as he moved this picture aside. Here was an image that wasn't in the tape. The style of it was more childish than the other drawings, or perhaps it only appeared that way because of the symbolism that it was trying to convey. In any case, Harry could tell that it was drawn by the same person as the other drawings.

 

Most of the paper was taken up by the outline of a two-story house. The walls of the house were transparent so that the interior of each room could be seen. Inside the house, Harry could see a few roughly-drawn female figures sitting on a couch in the living room. Another female figure stood in a much smaller room, with her hands pressed against a wall or door. The interior of this room was shadowed in with the pencil to suggest darkness. 

 

Vaguely below and to the left of the house was a tall shaft that ran off the bottom edge of the paper. Harry would have almost taken it for an elevator shaft if he didn't see the rounded lid on top of it. The inside of this well was also dark, but he could make out a faceless human figure seemingly scaling the wall of the shaft. A line of text curved from the well up toward the small room where the other figure appeared trapped: "I know your pain." 

 

_So Samara had sympathized with Kathy, too_ , Harry mused as he set this picture on the bed apart from the others. He wondered what the story was behind Kathy being trapped in a small room. He had a feeling that it might have something to do with the bad blood between Jill and Kathy.

 

The last picture in the pile was also not from the videotape. It was a rather beautiful picture of two girls sitting cross-legged, facing each other beneath a tree. There was grass all about them, and perhaps a lake off in the distance. The girl on the right side had curly brown hair. She smiled at the girl opposite her, who had long, thick, black hair. While her hair was thick enough that it covered most of the profile of her face, the tip of her nose and the curve of her lips were barely visible. Harry wondered if Samara had shown her face to Kathy before the latter had died. 

 

In some of the white space, words were written in the same curly script as on the other pictures. It looked like a poem:

 

_Freedom is a place_

_where I can hear your voice_

_and see your face_

_where the words we speak_

_are never silenced,_

_and our hearts are healed_

_from grief and violence_

Thoughtfully, Harry placed this picture on top of the picture of the transparent house. Hermione and Ron were watching him intently.

 

"Why'd you put those two separate?" Ron asked.

 

"They weren't in the video, were they?" Hermione asked wisely.

 

Harry shook his head. "It looks like Kathy felt some kind of kinship with Samara because of their shared experiences." He shifted the poem picture aside just enough so the girl in the well and the girl in the small room could be seen. 

 

"Like you," Ron said.

 

Harry shrugged.

 

"Do you think that's supposed to be Kathy?" Hermione asked, looking a little disturbed by this picture.

 

"I think so. Look at her hair. It's curly just like in this other picture," Harry said. 

 

"What did that foul woman do to her?" Hermione muttered, more to herself than anyone else. 

 

After a few more minutes of contemplating the pictures and hypothesizing about the two that weren't from the video, Ron stood up and announced that he was off to his parents' house. 

 

"I want to get this to Dad as soon as possible," he said, holding up the tape. He still looked worried. "That way we can figure something out." 

 

Hermione stood up, too. "Do you want me to come with you?"

 

"No," said Ron. "You stay here, help Harry, help Miami Metro investigate any leads they might find. We need to cover all the ground that we can."

 

As Ron was talking, Harry's pocket buzzed. He pulled his phone out and looked at the message from Dexter:

 

"We've issued a statement asking anyone who gave Kathy a videotape to come forward for an interview at the station. Usually that scares people out of wherever they're hiding." 

 

Harry smiled and typed, "Brilliant. Thanks."

 

As he looked up again, Hermione and Ron broke apart from a passionate embrace. Ron came forward to hug him, too, and then he turned in the middle of the room and Disapparated. 

 

Harry was exhausted, so he brushed his teeth, put his pajamas on, and climbed immediately into bed. He expected nightmares to come. However, he fell deeply and immediately asleep, and when he woke in the morning with the sun slanting through the blinds, he had no memory of nighttime hauntings.

 

He reached for his phone, intending to send Dexter a good morning text and ask if Miami Metro had gotten anyone to come forward yet. However, he saw that he had missed a call from an unknown number. He swiped into his phone and navigated to voicemail.

 

It was a man's voice, deeply distressed, shaken with sobs. "...calling this number because they said you were the ones investigating. Why the hell didn't anyone bother to let me know? Why didn't someone let me know that my daughter -" The word seemed to trigger more unrelenting sobs. The man was unintelligible for another moment as he attempted to catch his breath. "How could you not tell me about my baby? How could you? Someone - just - please call me and let me know what's going on." 

 

Harry set the phone down, feeling aghast and ashamed. 

 

"What is it?" Hermione asked, coming back from the bathroom already-dressed and fully-awake.

 

"Just heard from Kathy's father," Harry said weakly. "He's falling apart. Very upset that we didn't call him."

 

Hermione's face had set into a curious expression. It seemed like she was trying to look appropriately somber; however, she also seemed to be concocting the beginnings of an idea. "What a terrible oversight on our part," she mused. "Let's make it up to him. Call him back, apologize, and see if he can meet today." 


	19. A Tale of Two Fathers: Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning. This will probably be the darkest chapter of the work for its depictions of abuse.
> 
> 2 more chapters, people! (I think)

Kathy's father was a basset hound of a man. His eyes were wide, droopy, and despairing. He had Kathy's curls, though his were now gray and cut close to his head. He had grown a little pudgy in his old age and seemed to be fairly melting into his sofa as Hermione and Harry brought him up to speed on the investigation. 

 

"Why didn't she call me?" he asked faintly. "If you're right, and if this has to do with a tape that she watched a whole week in advance, why didn't she feel like she could reach out to me...?"

 

"Where were you that week, Mr. Merona?" Harry asked.

 

"I'm a saleswizard," Mr. Merona explained, waving his wand wearily at a briefcase that rested against the wall by a bookshelf. It sprang open to reveal hair potions, skin cream, and other cosmetic products that Harry had definitely seen in wizard stores before. "I sell cosmetic products, so I'm always traveling, trying to find new clients. But I always have a cell phone with me, so that if Kathy needs me, she can call. She doesn't like when I send a Patronus to communicate or use Floo Powder to put my head in her fire...makes her nervous. So we use cell phones - safe, comfortable Muggle technology..."

 

"Has magic always made Kathy nervous?" Hermione asked.

 

Mr. Merona's sorrowful eyes grew reserved. He seemed to be teetering, unsure how much he should say. "I don't want to give you all the wrong idea," he said slowly. "I don't think that Jill had anything to do with Kathy's...with this. And all of this is  _way_ in the past....but no, Kathy hasn't always been nervous about magic. That was something she learned from Jill." His lips were pressed grimly together.

 

"Is that why you left?" Harry asked cautiously. Mr. Merona nodded.

 

Hermione took a breath, and then brought out one of Kathy's pictures and placed it on the coffee table. It was the picture of Kathy standing in the small room, in the dark.

 

"Does this mean anything to you, Mr. Merona?" 

 

He looked shocked, as though they were showing him a picture of Kathy's corpse. His lips moved soundlessly as he placed a finger on the illustrated Kathy and followed the curving words, "I know your pain," to their origin near the girl scaling the interior of the well. "I don't know what  _this_ is," he said, gesturing at the well, "but the rest is something that happened. In fact, it was the thing that led to me leaving, with Kathy."

 

When he hesitated for another moment, his eyes still poring over the picture, Harry said tentatively, "Could you tell us what happened?"

 

Mr. Merona locked eyes with Harry, who suddenly realized how striking the resemblance was between Merona's sad eyes and Morgan's, as the latter smelled his dead wife's perfume. "I'll tell you," he said quietly. "I want to help, any way I can...but off the record. And with immunity. I did some things...not strictly legal...but with the best intentions."

 

"Understood," Harry said, setting down his pad. Hermione, on the other hand, looked hesitant about accepting this deal.

 

Merona began to speak, not looking at either of them. "When Kathy was little, Jill didn't take very well...the growing realization that she was a Squib. When Leah, our next-oldest, began to show magic at age three, before Kathy, Jill started to get nervous. It didn't matter to me," Merona rushed to assure them, "I grew up in a city with lots of Muggles, so the idea of having a Muggle daughter did not faze me - I loved her just the same. But to Jill - she had grown up in the country, sort of isolated, along with the other aristocratic magic families - so to her, Muggles were an alien race and...having a Muggle daughter - it meant a great deal. It was a status thing.

 

"Have you heard of Prodding?" Merona asked suddenly, looking at them again.

 

Hermione's face hardened, and Harry knew exactly why: "Prodding" was a slang term for when wizard parents tried to coax magic out of their children who hadn't shown signs of it yet. Usually it involved putting the child in mild predicaments or frightening them in an attempt to provoke a magical response. 

 

Harry remembered all too well Neville Longbottom's horrifying stories of being Prodded by his Great Uncle Algie - how he'd been dangled out of a window, and then dropped, and how his magical abilities had then materialized and prevented him from falling to his death. For Neville's family, this had been a moment of great pride, but Harry could tell that the memory still made Neville uncomfortable.

 

A great deal of the magical community had come around in recent decades and begun to recognize Prodding as a form of child abuse. However, there were still families that held out, claiming there was no harm in it, and offering as proof, "I was Prodded and I turned out just fine!" Hermione, having grown up in a Muggle house, found the idea of Prodding particularly repulsive. Since becoming an adult, she had started to campaign for the explicit criminalization of Prodding. Ron often joked that her political activism had returned with a fury not seen since her initial S.P.E.W. campaign for house elf rights.

 

So it did not surprise Harry when she replied in a cold voice, "Unfortunately, yes, we've heard of Prodding." 

 

Merona looked a little taken aback by her response. Silently, Harry made eye contact with him and offered what he hoped was an apologetic and sympathetic expression. Merona seemed to take heart from this and continued speaking.

 

"Well, Jill began to Prod Kathy, after Leah's magic started showing. It started innocent enough. Jill would incorporate it into their play together. She'd bewitch tennis balls and other soft objects to fly through the air - slowly - toward Kathy, the idea being that Kathy was supposed to use magic to divert their path. Instead, Kathy would giggle and bat them out of the air with her hands," Merona smiled reminiscently, his eyes far away. 

 

"But Jill would get very frustrated with her. After a while of doing this, she'd yell at Kathy, 'That's not how you're supposed to do it! Use your mind, not your hands!' The yelling upset Kathy. I pulled Jill aside and told her to cut it out. Kathy was a little kid and didn't deserve for her to take her frustration out on her.

 

"Then it got darker," he looked vaguely nauseated. "I came home one time and heard loud noises upstairs. I ran up there and found that Jill had put a tickling charm on Kathy. No idea how long it had been going on. Kathy was crying and screaming for it to stop, over her laughing. When I did, 'Finite Incantatem,' she keeled over and vomited on the floor."

 

Harry grimaced. Dudley had inflicted abusive tickling on him as a child, and he remembered how unpleasant it was to feel out of control of his body. The play wrestling that he had done with Dexter a few nights ago was worlds apart from that experience: there was mutual respect and trust, and the tickling had been exchanged in a spirit of affection rather than cruelty.

 

"Jill and I had a fight, then," Merona continued. "I told her that she was hurting Kathy and had to just come to terms with the fact that she might be a Squib. She got very defensive and said that it was just play and that nobody could be harmed by it. My mistake was that I should have left that night and taken Kathy with me. It might have been early enough for her to recover."

 

Merona's eyes squeezed shut and he began to rock with silent sobs. Unlike Morgan, he didn't try to hide the fact that he was crying. It took him several minutes to continue speaking. "But I let the Prodding continue. I think Jill did a better job of hiding it from me after that, and instead of monitoring closer as I should've, I turned my head, convincing myself that it would all be for the best in the end, once Kathy showed magic, and that scores of witches and wizards had been Prodded before and had turned out fine.

 

"I still intervened sometimes. There was another time when Jill and Kathy were in the backyard, and Jill was levitating Kathy way up high, letting her drop, and then stopping her fall just before she hit the ground. Again, Kathy was screaming for it to stop, to be put down, and Jill wasn't listening to her. Kathy was looking sick, so I cast 'Impedimenta' at Jill to push her and disrupt the spell and then lowered Kathy gently to the ground. She was shaking all over from all the up and down and from being afraid. And then I felt a slash on my face."

 

Merona touched his cheek and Harry noticed a thin scar there. "I turned and Jill was looking daggers at me, with her wand drawn. I remember she said, 'Don't you ever fucking point your wand at me again when I'm working with our daughter.' We had another fight. I again decided to back down. 'Kathy's 6 now,' she kept saying. 'Everyone knows that 7 is usually the age where kids are declared Squibs if they haven't shown magic yet.' She was determined to beat that deadline, for Kathy's own good, she said.

 

"As Kathy got older and eventually surpassed that deadline, Jill began to use their 'lessons' as an excuse to vent her rage on Kathy. She'd refuse to feed her for a day, and when I'd get home, she'd say, 'She can summon her own damn food if she really wants it.' I'd wait for her to leave and then take Kathy out to get something to eat at a buffet. I started to feel a little afraid of Jill, myself. She's a powerful woman, and her temper was making her more and more unpredictable.

 

"Then one day, when Kathy was ten, Jill did the worst possible thing she could to her. Kathy was terrified of the dark. After it happened, Kathy told me that Jill had yelled at her for being useless and then locked her in the pantry. She left her in there a whole day and overnight. I was away on a trip, and when I came back the next day, I found her in clothes that she had soiled, starving, and with splinters deep under her nails from trying to get out."

 

With a sudden gripping feeling in his stomach, Harry remembered the gouge marks that he had seen on the interior of Jill's pantry door. Why had she never repaired them with magic? 

 

Hermione asked just this question and Merona said, "Even Muggles are capable of sporadic magic when they're in great distress. I think that Kathy was in such an intense panic that she made marks that couldn't even be removed by magic." 

 

"Anyway," he continued, "That was when I decided that enough was enough. I helped Kathy gather her things together and we left. When we got to a hotel, I performed a series of memory charms on Kathy. I know that it's not legal, but I wanted to help her forget all of the terrible things that Jill had done to her and just raise her as a Muggle. But trauma is a hard thing to modify with a memory charm...it runs deep rivets in the brain, and I didn't want to go too deep - with memory charms, there's always the worry that you'll erase a critical part of the person's identity. 

 

"So on the surface, Kathy didn't remember anything of what happened with her mother. However, whenever she'd encounter things that were related to what she had experienced, it seemed like it would jog something for her and cause distress. She was always nervous about magic after that, whenever I did it. And once, after I'd gotten a new house, I found her in the kitchen, staring at the open pantry door with tears streaming down her face."

 

"So it must have come back to her," Hermione said. "Jill told us that Kathy had lunch with her a year ago to talk about how she had been raised. She wouldn't have reached out to have that conversation if she didn't remember anything, would she?"

 

But something else had just occurred to Harry. "Mr. Merona, did you know about this lunch with Jill from last year?" 

 

Mr. Merona looked uncomfortable. "No, I didn't. Kathy and I have been on rather uncomfortable terms for a little over a year. That's one reason why this hit me so hard, because we never..." he sniffed. "Never had a chance to get back to where we were. You see, what happened was this: I came home from work one day and she confronted me. She asked me what her mother had done to her. I tried to tell her that it didn't matter, that she didn't have to worry about it anymore. That just made her angry. She said that she deserved to know the truth. 

 

"And then she asked why she didn't remember. I couldn't think of what to say. I guess she could figure it out from the look on my face, because then she asked, 'Did you do something to my memory?' I tried to explain to her that I had done it to try to protect her, to help her heal. She - " Merona's lip trembled as he remembered. "She flew into a sort of rage. She yelled that everything was my fault, that I had ruined everything, that I had let Jill hurt her for years and then messed around in her mind. I said that it was kind of unfair to blame me for what Jill did, but then she asked why I didn't leave earlier, when things first started happening. And I - and I -" his shoulders shook and he began to sob. "I didn't have - a good answer for that." 

 

Hermione looked at Harry, her face aghast. Harry didn't know what to do or say to comfort Merona. And despite the fact that he seemed to be a better person than Jill, part of him thought that Merona was right to feel bad for not removing Kathy from Jill's toxic behavior sooner.

 

"So then she left?" Hermione asked.

 

Merona wiped his eyes. "Yes, that was when she got her own place. And after a few months, we started to speak again. I sent her a letter saying how sorry I was, how I understood if she could never forgive me. And she responded. And lately, things have still been awkward, not natural like they used to be, but we were working on having our father-daughter relationship back again. In any case, I figured that things were patched up enough that she would reach out to me if she needed help. We were going to go to dinner when I came back from my most recent sales trip."

 

As Merona looked sadly at his traveling suitcase, Harry reflected on the extent to which a single person's death created holes in the lives of those around them, some bigger than others. He thought of all of the customers at Kathy's bank who would probably ask about her for a few weeks until they became accustomed to the person replacing her, her friend who had come looking for her at her house - and who would probably never forget stumbling upon the wreckage of broken glass and blood, and her father, who would never get to have the dinner that he had planned with his daughter, a dinner that symbolized the beginnings of reconciliation for him.

 

"All right, Mr. Merona, thank you for your time," Harry said sadly, standing up with Hermione. "I think we have everything we need to continue investigating. We wish you peace and healing as you grieve."

 

Merona nodded slowly, distractedly, with his eyes squeezed shut. Then he opened them and said, "Her funeral is tonight. You all are welcome to come. Maybe it would help you...there'll be more people who knew her there, maybe someone who knew what was going on..."

 

"Thank you," Hermione said, leaning forward and taking Merona's hands between hers. "We know how difficult it must be to have us hovering around while you take this all in, but we'll do our best to figure out what happened to her. So you can have some closure at least." 

 

"I appreciate it. Thank you," Merona said, squeezing Hermione's hands and slumping back into his couch cushions. As they left his house, Harry took one last look back over his shoulder. Merona appeared to be melting back into his couch again, or drowning, like a man lost at sea.


	20. The Funeral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...after some reflection, there's probably going to be an epilogue, too. So two more chapters, guys! I'm already partway done writing one of them.
> 
> As always, comments are appreciated :)

When Hermione and Harry left Aaron Merona's house, they were both silent, lost in the gloom of what they had heard and their own musings.

 

Hermione drove them over to a McDonald's for lunch, which in itself was a testament to how distracted she was by Merona's tale - ordinarily she would never choose fast food. Once they'd settled down at a table with their plastic trays and Harry had bitten into his hamburger, Hermione posed the question that he was thinking.

 

"So, where does this all put us? It's clear that Kathy's body being moved to the pantry was supposed to point back to what Jill did to her. And the song you heard..."

 

"'Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes,'" Harry mulled over the lyrics under his breath. "Well, we were right that she was ashamed of Kathy for being a Squib. So if Samara really did kill Kathy - "

 

"I think we've pretty well established  _that_  by this point," Hermione said.

 

Harry ignored her. "If she did, then was she trying to frame Jill by mirroring what she had done? Or is she trying to tell us something else? Like, maybe, that yes, she - Samara - killed Kathy, but Kathy was already dead inside because of what had been done to her?" 

 

Hermione pursed her lips in thought. "That's a possibility," she said, popping a chicken nugget into her mouth. "Or maybe she put Kathy there because that was how she had related to Kathy - having been imprisoned in a dark place herself." 

 

Harry shrugged, wondering if Hermione and Ron would find him in a cupboard under a staircase in six days. "Do you reckon Ron'll be back soon?"

 

"I don't know," Hermione said. "I haven't heard from him. I'm starting to feel a little worried, though I suppose it might take him and his dad some time to figure out the videotape." 

 

They threw away their trash and exited the restaurant. The sun was baking hot and made a strange haze above the pavement. As Harry stepped off of the sidewalk in front of the McDonald's, he paused when something caught his eye. He turned to his right and saw a tall ladder leaned up against the side of the building. There were no workers on the roof. 

 

Just as he'd experienced in the Morgan house, he felt a physical, intense recognition of the ladder, associating it with the one in the video...the ladder that leaned against the blank wall and then fell, clattering, to the ground in the latter half of the video. 

 

"What are you looking at?" Hermione asked him. 

 

Harry came back to the present and turned to see her watching him. "Nothing," he said, and followed her the rest of the way to the car. He would have bet a considerable amount of Galleons that she could not see the ladder herself, not that it would have held any importance for her anyway.

 

***

There were not many people at Kathy's funeral. There were about 5 young people who looked to be Kathy's age; a small delegation of sharply dressed people that Harry supposed were from Kathy's bank; Aaron Merona; about 8 people clustered around him on his pew who were probably relatives, judging from family resemblance; and Harry, Hermione, and Dexter. Jill and her other daughters, notably, were absent.

 

Dexter had asked if he could come, both to see Harry again and to help him investigate the other funeral attendees. "Whoever gave Kathy the videotape is probably going to be drawn to the funeral," he said. "They're going to want to get a good idea of what people already know about it. Or if they're a real friend, then they'll be drawn there because they feel guilty..."

 

"You don't think that guilt would make them do the opposite? Stay away?" Harry had asked as he watched Dexter fold down the collar of his black suit in the mirror.

 

"That's not what my lizard brain is telling me," Dexter said. "And my lizard brain is usually right about these things." 

 

Harry had never heard the phrase, "lizard brain" before, but he figured that Dexter had not yet given him a reason  _not_ to trust his lizard brain. 

 

"If they'd killed her with their own hands, it'd be different," Dexter said. "Then they'd stay away. But this time, an intermediate object - the videotape - is responsible for the death itself. That gives them a cushion of safety. Now, our only question is - did the person give Kathy the tape hoping that she would watch it and die? Or did they think that she could somehow stop the curse?"

 

Now Dexter sat beside Harry in the last populated pew, closest to the outer aisle so that he could scrutinize all of the other attendees. His eyes were narrowed as they swept over the small group of Kathy's friends and lingered on one of the men in suits. He was older and he shifted a lot in his seat as the pastor delivered the eulogy before the closed coffin. 

 

Harry wondered suddenly what Dexter would do if they found the person who gave Kathy the videotape. Was he planning on killing them, the way he did with his other criminals? There was a glint in Dexter's eyes, as they roved over the other attendees, that appeared almost hungry. Much as Harry felt no sympathy for the person who had exposed Kathy to the curse, he started to worry what his superiors at the Ministry would think if a Muggle witness to his case disappeared or was murdered when he was supposed to be collecting information from them. It wouldn't look good, and it would lead to more scrutiny than he would prefer...

 

After leading them in prayer, the pastor took a seat in the first pew and Kathy's friends went up, one by one, to talk about their memories of her. Among them, Harry recognized her friend from the bank - the one who had found the blood and glass in the living room. Everybody described Kathy as a quiet friend, one who listened more than she spoke, who comforted and soothed her friends when they went through hard times, though she rarely reached out for consolation herself. The greatest regret of all the friends, it seemed, was that they hadn't been there for her when she needed them, that they hadn't checked in on her even when they suspected that things might not be going well. 

 

The last girl who spoke, who had gone to school with Kathy, ended her speech by saying, "I wish that Kathy and I had gotten together more in the past year. Our different jobs kept us apart, and neither of us expected something like this to happen. But even though she has passed away, I'm confident that she still lives with us, with each of us who remember her. We might forget, day by day, what phrases she used, what clothes she wore, the gentle way she smiled" - Harry could see Merona shaking silently in the first row. An older woman on his right-hand side pulled his head onto her shoulder, quite firmly, and held him around the shoulders.

 

"We may forget those things," the girl continued, "but there are little moments, little rituals, that bring her back. By accident, you might tell someone else a joke she told you, or you might be eating in a restaurant that you visited once with her. My favorite way to remember her is music. Does everyone remember her favorite band?"

 

There were some murmurs among the younger attendees of the funeral. Harry could hear, "The Shins," distinctly among several of the voices. The cacophonous chorus of "Sh-" made them sound as though they were admonishing the rest of the church to hush. With a jolt, Harry remembered seeing Kathy's Shins poster in her room. 

 

The girl beside the coffin pointed at the first person who had said it, smiling. "Yes. The Shins. One of my favorite memories of Kathy was getting to go see them live a few years ago. It was our first year of college, and I had gotten the tickets for her birthday. I can still say that I've never seen her so happy than when she was up there by the stage, singing along to her favorite songs, looking up at the band all starry-eyed...And now I think of her whenever I listen to that music. Let's all take a moment to remember her that way now, singing along to the music that made her happy."

 

And with that, she pressed a remote that was up on the pulpit and gentle music surrounded them. Soft percussive chinks and voices singing softly, like the wind seething through the trees. Harry recognized the song. It was one of the most famous songs by The Shins, "New Slang." Even though he had never seen Kathy when she was alive, he could imagine her riding in her car down the palm tree-lined streets of Miami, her window down and her brown curls whipping in and out of the window as she sang:

 

"And if you took to me like

A gull takes to the wind

I'd've jumped from my tree

And I'd've danced like the king of the eyesores

And the rest of our lives would've fared well."

 

He felt goosebumps on his arms. Hermione was crying silently beside him. In the front pew, Merona made a strange sound, as though he were choking, and the older woman beside him, whom Harry thought was his mother, continued to hold him firmly against her, rocking slightly in her seat. 

 

Then the song faded out, and with it, Harry's vision of Kathy driving and singing along. They were left rooted in the cold present, without music, in a dark church where the reality of death pressed on them like suffocating air.

 

***

 

After the burial, everyone was invited to Aaron Merona's house for a reception. The guests deposited white flowers beside a beaming school picture of Kathy that was framed on the coffee table. They stood in groups in the rooms downstairs, talking in hushed voices, all wearing black.

 

Aaron Merona thanked them with red eyes when Hermione placed the angel food cake that they had bought at the store on the table. Harry put some grapes, a buttered roll, and a small sandwich on his plate. He was starving. Hermione, however, was too busy talking with Merona, greeting his mother and father and one of his sisters, sharing her condolences in the graceful way that only she could accomplish. 

 

Merona's plastic cup of wine slipped out of his hand and spilled over his shoes. His sister immediately pulled out her wand and bent to clean it, but Merona, more animated than he had been all evening, hissed at her, "Put it away! There are Muggles here." His sister, who appeared younger by several years, flushed and stowed it away quickly, hurrying off to the kitchen to get a rag instead. 

 

Merona turned to Harry and Hermione. "One of the reasons that I  _invited_ Muggles was so that there would be no magic. Kathy hated magic, so I didn't want to give her a typical funeral. It would be disrespectful to her memory." He wiped his eyes and knelt down again to help his sister wipe up the spill with a kitchen cloth. It stained red as it soaked in the wine.

 

Harry and Hermione drifted back to the living room to join Dexter, who was leaning against the wall and nonchalantly listening to the conversations around him. Harry, too, picked up snippets of what was being said by the different clusters of mourning people.

 

"...wasn't herself for at least a week. One reason I checked on her was because I thought she seemed depressed, and you never know..."

 

"...mother wasn't there..."

 

"...had a clean break with that part of the family when she was 10..."

 

"...but still, not showing up to your daughter's funeral..."

 

No one was talking about a videotape. Harry gazed at all of the gloomy or gossiping faces and tried to detect guilt in one of them. He hoped that Dexter's lizard brain was picking up something, because his normal brain sure wasn't. Harry glided through the living room, leaving Hermione and Dexter behind him. He stood in the half-shadowed foyer, with the office on his right and the living room full of people on his left. In front of him was the carpeted staircase that led to the second floor.

 

Harry wondered if Merona had converted Kathy's old room into a guest bedroom, or if it still held all of the accumulated toys and possessions of childhood and adolescence. Maybe more band posters on the wall or skinny jeans in the closet. He had a strong suspicion that sentimental Merona had kept the room exactly the same as it had been on the day that she left.

 

Suddenly, the hairs on the right side of Harry's neck stood up. Someone was watching him from the office. Very carefully, Harry took a step back away from the staircase and used his peripheral vision to scout out that room. It was entirely dark in there, since the lights were off and night had fallen outside. 

 

He almost could have mistaken her for a floor lamp, since she was standing as still as the furniture around her. But he could tell it was Samara, her waterlogged, white dress barely visible in the shadows of the corner in which she stood. A blanket of hair fell over her face, down to her waist. Her terrible, rotting arm was stretched out in front of her, pointing. 

 

Once Harry started to breathe again, after the initial assault of familiar fear that he experienced at the sight of her, he started to wonder at her pointing finger. She wasn't pointing at him, but slightly to his left - perhaps at something in the room that he couldn't see from the hallway. 

 

Much as he didn't want to get closer to her, he edged a few steps into the room, looking briefly behind him to make sure that no one was watching. There was nothing in the corner of the room that she was pointing at. Nothing but a chair.

 

Frustrated, he looked back at her to see if she was still pointing there. She was. From the back of the house, Harry heard the sound of a sink running and then a door opening. Footsteps trod down the hall toward the front door.

 

Harry stifled a gasp. Her finger was moving now, following the footsteps as they came closer to the foot of the stairs. A young man emerged into Harry's view, one of the people that Harry had taken to be Kathy's friends. He was blond and his face was as gloomy as everyone else's. Before turning into the living room, he looked over at the office and noticed Harry. Then his eyes slid over Harry's shoulder and his face went slack with fear. Harry knew, with total conviction, that he could see Samara, too. 

 

"Wait," Harry said, walking toward the man. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

 

The man was distracted, still looking over Harry's shoulder. Harry had to ask him again.

 

"What?" he said. "What is it you want to talk about? Have we met?"

 

"No," Harry said quietly. "We haven't met. But I can see her, too." He lifted his head to indicate the area behind him.

 

The man's eyes flickered, as though he were considering denying it.

 

"How about we go out on the porch for a minute? I'd like to talk to you about a videotape."

 

There was no denying it this time - the man's eyes widened at the mention of the videotape. Seemingly aware that Harry had noticed, he said, "OK," in a resigned voice, and led the way to the front door. In the hallway, Harry waved to get Hermione and Dexter's attention. They followed him outside as well.

 

All four of them stepped out onto the brick porch and shut the door on the funereal murmurs inside. Outside, fireflies glowed intermittently and moths beat above them at the porch lights. The air was hot and sticky.

 

"I'm Harry," he said, extending his hand to the nervous man who appeared to be about his age, but taller. "What's your name?"

 

"Chris," he said, reluctantly taking Harry's hand. 

 

Hermione and Dexter also introduced themselves, and then Harry spoke again. "We know about the videotape and we know that you've seen it. Tell us what you know about it."

 

"I didn't mean for her to die," he blurted immediately. "I told her what she was supposed to do." 

 

Harry, Hermione, and Dexter all hesitated for a moment, stunned. Then Hermione said, "What do you mean, what she was supposed to do?"

 

"Make a copy and show it to another person," he said impatiently.

 

Hermione looked around at Harry quickly, her eyes wide with hope. Chris noticed.

 

"You've seen it, too," he said to Harry, matter-of-factly. Harry nodded.

 

"How did you find out how to survive?" Harry asked.

 

"Some friends who saw it before me learned the hard way," Chris said grimly. "A few weeks ago, a group of them went up to Seattle. I was supposed to go, too, but my work screwed me over last minute. They stayed in the city for a few days and then went north. They rented a cabin in this resort place near the shore. Creepy place, they said.

 

"Anyway, they were trying to rent a pay-per-view movie there, in their cabin, when the VCR kicked on and started playing that freaky tape. And then they got the call." Chris looked meaningfully at Harry. "They didn't know what the hell it meant at first. They came back home and went about their normal lives. But Jeff was real concerned about it, he wasn't going to laugh it off like the other guys. I think," said Chris with another significant glance at Harry, "that he started to see shit before the others. He had taken the tape with him and was going to study it. We were both in the same film class, so he made a copy for me so that I could watch it and help him figure it out, too. That was on his third day.

 

"Creepy stuff started to happen to me, too, and sure enough, four days later, I got a few calls from friends. Tim, dead. Mason, dead. Andy, dead. One call right after the other. I knew right away that it was the tape. We hadn't gotten real far in figuring out who these people were and what they wanted, but we  _had_ figured out that seven days was a deadline. 

 

"Nobody mentioned Jeff, though, so I called him up right away and got ahold of him. I was relieved, you know, that he was alive. But we had no clue how he survived when the other guys didn't. He was still afraid, and didn't seem relieved until the next day, when he was sure that something would've already come for him by then if it was going to. 

 

"Meanwhile, shit was getting scarier for me. Have you noticed that it gets more intense each day? Anyway, I asked him very nicely to try to wrack his brains and think about what it was he did differently from the other guys, for my sake. And he did. It took the bastard til the end of my fifth day, but he finally came to my place and told me, 'Chris, the others didn't copy the tape! I think you live if you copy it and show it to someone else,' and I said, 'Are you sure? Do you have to do both or is it enough to just show it to someone?' and he said, 'I don't know, but it's probably safest that we have you do it exactly how I did it.' So we did."

 

Chris paused, clearly uncomfortable. This was the part of the story where Kathy came in.

 

Dexter asked, "How did you know Kathy?"

 

"She comes...used to come hang out at the bookstore where I worked, when she got off at the bank. She'd read her book and have a coffee, and I'd come out from the counter and chat with her when there weren't customers," Chris said. "She thought it was cool that I was a film major, and we'd go to movies every now and then."

 

"So you told her about the tape and asked her to help you?" Dexter said.

 

Chris nodded. "One strange thing was that she believed me right away. I'd been afraid of telling her - or anyone, thinking they'd find it ridiculous," he said. Harry, by contrast, was not at all surprised that Kathy had believed him right away. She had already been exposed to magic and curses. It wouldn't be a far jump for her to accept the existence of a cursed videotape.

 

"I think she was scared at first, but she also saw the state I was in. It was my sixth day, and that damn girl wouldn't leave me alone, no matter where I went. Anyway, it's like everyone was saying at the funeral," his lip trembled slightly, "she was a good friend. She wanted to help me and I told her how she could do it safely. I came over to her house that night and we watched it together. As soon as she got the call, I felt a weight lift off me, as though the dead girl had been sitting on my shoulders, waiting til she could kill me - and now the weight of the curse, or whatever it was, was gone."

 

"Did you check on Kathy after that?" Harry asked. "To make sure that she followed through and made her own copy?"

 

Chris looked ashamed, his lips turned down. "No, I didn't," he said. "I know I should've. But I had exams coming up and had to catch up on my schoolwork. The whole week I'd had the curse, I'd fallen behind. I just took it for granted that she would be able to make a copy and pass it on." 

 

There was a silence. Dexter took a threatening step forward.

 

"So you're sure," he said in a low voice, "That you told her what she was supposed to do? That she was supposed to make a copy?"

 

Chris, big and jockish as he was, still appeared cowed by Dexter's advance. He nodded quickly. "Of course. I liked Kathy. I would never use her like that. But you know what I think?" He looked out into the night, almost talking to himself. "Even though she told me that she would make a copy and pass it on, even though she promised me...I bet she probably didn't on purpose, because she didn't feel right spreading the curse. That was the kind of person she was. She was one of those people that you always vent to, and she would just listen, and give advice, and be the most understanding person ever.  _She_  never did that though. She never shared her darkness with anyone else, if she could avoid it." 

 

Dexter stepped back, and Harry knew from the fleeting disappointment in his eyes that he did not have to worry about Dexter killing Chris. He would honor his code. He felt his muscles relax. He hadn't realized that he was standing tensed, on the balls of his feet, until he eased back into a looser stance.

 

Something of Chris's story finally struck him. "Where did you say your friends stayed again?"

 

"Cabin resort," said Chris. He squinted his eyes in thought. "I think it was called Shelter Mountain Inn."

 

"Why did your friends think it was creepy? Apart from the videotape?"

 

"I think it was mainly that, plus it was surrounded by trees, kind of mossy and unkempt..." Chris said. "Oh, and they also mentioned that they heard weird noises."

 

"What kind of noises?"

 

"Grinding noises," Chris said uncertainly, clearly trying to remember. "Like rocks being scraped together. Sounded like it was coming from under the floor, but there wasn't any door to a basement."

 

At the mention of rocks being scraped together, a vision flashed before Harry's eyes - he remembered the dream where he was in the well, looking up at the circle of light as the well lid slid over the opening and trapped him in the dark. He remembered the deafening grinding noise of stone against stone.

 

"You all right?" Chris asked. 

 

Dexter was gripping Harry's shoulder to keep him from tripping and falling over. Harry gently lay his hand over one of Dexter's to signal that he was all right. 

 

"Fine," Harry started to say. "I just -"

 

But Chris was giving him a knowing look. "You just saw something. She just showed you something, didn't she?"

 

Harry nodded and Chris shivered. "Do yourself a favor, man," he said to Harry. "And get rid of that thing as soon as possible. Do you have an enemy? Invite him over for a movie night. You can tell him what to do afterward, but the main thing is to wash your hands clean of it."

 

Harry steeled himself to ask the last question that might be useful for the investigation. "Chris. Forgive me for being blunt, but...how did your friends die?"

 

Chris gave his head a shake as though to disperse Harry's apology, wave it away. "They all had closed coffins, too," he said. "All of them turned up with heart failure in the autopsy. All of them found in defensive or fleeing positions. Like they were being chased.

 

"Look," he said with an air of finality. "I'm sorry I can't be of more help. I'm really sorry that Kathy's dead. But I'm telling you that the most helpful thing I can say is to get rid of that videotape as fast as you can."

 

"Thanks for your time," Harry said, and watched Chris re-enter the house through the front door. 

 

"This is great!" Hermione said, as soon as the door had closed behind him. "Now we know how to save you, Harry. You'll make a copy, and then Ron or I will watch the tape, and -"

 

"No," Harry said tersely.

 

"But Harry, we know what we need to do to save ourselves -"

 

"Didn't you hear how he was talking about the tape? I'm not putting you all through this curse just to save me -"

 

"We're already having dreams, she's already affecting us, it's not like it'd make any difference -"

 

Then Dexter interjected gently. "I have a much better idea for how to get rid of the tape. All I need from you all is an address and a few hours to plan." 


	21. Sins of the Mother, Song of the Daughter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the penultimate installment of everyone's favorite Harry Potter/Dexter/The Ring fan-fiction (not being cocky, but I think mine might be the only one that has that combination...so it is also everyone's least favorite)!!! It is technically the last chapter, though there is also an Epilogue. I have already written that, too, but still need to proof it, so that will probably be coming either tonight or tomorrow!

Ron was waiting for them when they arrived back at the hotel that evening, looking very impatient and pleased to see them.

 

"We figured it out!" he told them eagerly without any greeting or preamble. "In order to survive, you have to copy the tape and show it to another person!"

 

When Harry and Hermione merely exchanged smiles and did not gasp and exclaim with surprise, Ron's excitement deflated a little. "What? Did you all find that out already?"

 

"Just now, at Kathy's funeral," Hermione said apologetically. "We found the guy who gave the tape to Kathy. He explained it to us."

 

Ron, looking exasperated, lifted his hands in the air. "What's the point of sending me somewhere to find something out if you're going to find it out yourself?"

 

"Well, maybe if you didn't take a whole day to get back -" Hermione started to say.

 

"We weren't planning on finding it out," Harry said. "In any case, it's good that you got the same information independently. Now we can be sure that it'll work. How did you find it out, anyway?"

 

"Dad," Ron said simply. "And McGonagall."

 

Now Hermione looked surprised. "Professor McGonagall got involved?"

 

Ron nodded. "That's why it took us some time, because we had to track her down. After looking at the tape himself and doing some investigatory spells, Dad was able to determine that part of the curse involved Transfiguration, and that McGonagall would be the best one to look it over."

 

"Transfiguration?" Hermione said musingly, but Ron continued speaking.

 

"Since it's summer, we figured she wouldn't be at Hogwarts, so we Apparated to her home, but she wasn't there. So then we went to the Order Headquarters and Kingsley told us that she was doing an undercover mission. Apparently there are some wizards who have been hiding out in Belgravia, breaking into Muggles' homes, cursing them, and then stealing their money and possessions. 

 

"The Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes has had a job of running around, modifying memories. Nobody could get a good description of the people behind it, so McGonagall has been keeping watch in cat form, trying to detect signs of anything suspicious.

 

"Anyway, as soon as we told Kingsley what was going on, he sent a message to her and he was able to take her place so that she could come back to headquarters." 

 

Ron shook his head and a shadow of dark awe passed over his face. "You should have seen her when she first saw the tape," he said. "She winced when she took it into her hands, and then set it on the table like it was a dead thing. She shooed us away at first so that she could examine it properly." Harry smiled, imagining Professor McGonagall waving them away with a stern look. "And then she called us back half an hour later, so that we could give her background on Samara. She took notes. Some things seemed to surprise her and others seemed to satisfy her, like we were confirming what she had already figured out. 

 

"She was surprised to find that Samara had been a young girl when she died - apparently the level of magic required to create something like this tape was way beyond the abilities that she expected of someone so young. Then she seemed satisfied when we told her that it was her mother who had killed her - apparently her spellwork had shown her that the curse was spawned by a loved one's betrayal - the worst betrayal, murder."

 

"So what does Transfiguration have to do with the curse?" said Hermione impatiently. She was clearly miffed that Ron was privy to knowledge that she wasn't. 

 

Ron smirked at her, noticing her irritation. "When you watch the tape, you become Anna," he said. 

 

There was a silence in which Hermione stared at him, frustrated and uncomprehending. Harry, too, looked at him with puzzlement, but then another image from the tape swam before his eyes.

 

Anna, in the mirror, brushing her hair. No sign of any camera in the reflection - and eeriest of all, the way her eyes made contact with Harry's as he watched the tape. When watching the tape, he had felt as though she could see him through the screen. But instead, maybe their eyes made contact because she had become  _his_ reflection.

 

"The tape was created because all that Samara wanted at the time of her death was for her mother to come back and save her, and for the betrayal committed against her - by the person she loved most in the world - to be made untrue. When she died, her entire force of being was striving toward communication with her mother, and it was that dying emotion that created the tape. This is why, when you watch the tape, you start to hallucinate images from it - because you've Transfigured into Anna and she experienced hallucinations.

 

"Here's the catch," Ron continued. "Once you become Anna, the only way to get rid of the curse entirely would be to do exactly what Samara wanted - save her and make Anna's initial betrayal of her untrue."

 

"But that's impossible," Harry said. "Samara's already dead."

 

"Exactly," said Ron. "'Nothing can put the murder of a child to rights.' That was what McGonagall said. She said that it was deep magic."

 

"So why does she let you live if you make a copy?" Harry asked.

 

"I'm getting there," said Ron. "Let's start with why you die. Part of the sensations that went into the creation of the tape was the agony of Samara's death. So even though you transform into Anna, you experience Samara's death."

 

"Seven days..." Hermione said slowly. "Is that how long it took for Samara...?"

 

Her question died, but Ron nodded and responded, "That's what McGonagall thinks."

 

Harry, meanwhile, was thinking about the  _how_ of Samara's death. Did she drown? Did she starve? Did she die of poisoning from drinking the water that she had been living in, depositing waste in, for seven long days? He shuddered. No matter which fate claimed her, it was terrible to consider any of them waiting for him at the end of his seven days.

 

"So you live if you make a copy," Ron continued, "for two reasons. One is that Samara wanted to be heard and understood. So passing on the tape, multiplying the curse with copies, gives this last living bit of Samara a chance to be heard and, therefore, continue living. The other reason - this is what McGonagall said - is that the tape is a womb. If it does not give birth to more of itself, then it gives birth to the cursed bit of Samara that lives in it."

 

"What do you mean by it giving  _birth_ to Samara?" Harry asked.

 

"I don't know," Ron said. "It's what McGonagall said. I don't think you want to wait around to find out, though."

 

He said it in a light-hearted tone, but they all sat in somber silence for a moment all the same.

 

"Right," said Harry finally. "We'll copy the tape and then give it to Dexter when we meet him for breakfast tomorrow morning."

 

"Dexter's going to watch the tape?" Ron asked curiously.

 

"No," said Harry. "He had a better idea for it, a more permanent idea." 

***

The next day, after eating breakfast at IHOP with Dexter, Ron, and Hermione and solidifying the plans for that evening, Harry went back to Kathy Merona's house, alone. His lingering, unanswered questions drew him to the place, and he felt sure that he would only receive answers if he was alone.

 

As Harry walked up the driveway, the house seemed to lean toward him, something straining to escape from its interior. At the same time, it had a drained appearance - Kathy was fading fast from it, spilling over its edges. It was a sad sight. Soon it would no longer be a home, but an unoccupied building.

 

Harry opened the front door with a sense of loss, knowing that it would be the last time. Not only did he grieve for the fading presence of Kathy in the house, but also for the fact that, once the curse had been passed on this evening, he imagined that he would cease to hear from Samara. As terrifying as all of his encounters with her had been so far, he had come to appreciate her presence, as though she were an out-of-sight companion, a helpful guide throughout their investigation.

 

Harry switched on the light in the living room and saw that the Hazmat crew had finally come by to clean up the crime scene. The coffee table and its shattered remains had been removed from the middle of the floor, and all of the blood stains in the carpet had been thoroughly cleaned. Harry approached the mouth of the dark hallway and found that the same was true of the carpet in there. It had been scrubbed and brushed to white, fluffy perfection.

 

With some foreboding, Harry walked into the kitchen, opened the pantry door, and switched on the light. There was a can of corn on the floor, but no sign of the body that had sat there only a few days previously, no Samara waiting to convey a message to him. The pantry - the whole house - reeked of the finality of death and silence.

 

Frustrated, Harry strode over to the couch in the living room and sat down, facing the black TV screen. Just after watching the tape, he had seen Samara's reflection in that screen, standing behind the couch with her hands clenched on the back. Now, she wasn't reflected there, but Harry still craned his neck to look behind him and reached a hand over to feel the smooth back of the leather couch. 

 

He settled back onto the cushions and sighed. Even after everything they had found out about Kathy's and Samara's pasts, how the two were related to each other, and the mechanics of the curse, he still felt that the most important questions had yet to be answered: Why didn't Kathy make a copy of the tape? And how exactly did she die?

 

Harry hadn't realized that his eyes were squeezed shut in deep thought until a sweet whisper, right beside his ear, said, "I can answer the second question, Harry Potter." 

 

As he opened his eyes, he had a brief impression of thick, black hair beside him before his wrist was once again taken into the simultaneously cold, wet, and then burning hot grip of a leathery, dead child's arm. 

 

Harry winced in pain, and when he opened his eyes again, the room had changed: The glass coffee table was in front of him, wholly intact and unbroken; the darkness of the sky outside the window showed him that it was night; and he could hear noises behind him in the kitchen. 

 

First he looked quickly to his right. Samara had disappeared, though he had another hand-shaped welt on his wrist. Now he turned and placed his hands on the back of the couch, sitting up on his knees to get a better view of what was going on in the kitchen.

 

A gentle-faced girl approached the opening behind the counter, carrying a large bowl. Harry looked at her kind eyes and curly, brown hair. It was Kathy. She poured some melted butter into her bowl and then added a liberal amount of salt. As she shook the bowl, Harry realized that she had made popcorn from the rustle that it made in the bowl. 

 

She ate a handful of it, her eyes closed in relish, and then strode back to the fridge. She opened it and then bent over to rummage in it. 

First a blip, and then persistent static tore through the silence. Harry whipped around and saw that the television had turned on and static raged across it.

 

Kathy definitely stiffened upon hearing the static, but she turned around calmly and took another handful of popcorn before striding into the living room. She didn't behave like a normal person in the same situation, Harry thought. She didn't turn off the television or approach it with a concerned expression, suspecting that it must be broken or malfunctioning somehow. Instead, she merely watched it intently and a little fearfully. How much of this did she know was coming?  Harry wondered. 

 

Suddenly, the static stopped. In its place was the very last shot from the videotape, with the well off in the distance in a clearing. Three eerie, ascending tones sang from the screen. Now Kathy's eyebrows were raised. This did not seem to be in line with what she expected. She moved forward so that she stood between the table and the television, then she knelt before the screen, blocking Harry's view until he had scooted over to the right side of the couch.

 

The screen flickered, like a candle on the cusp of dying, like a program with bad reception. Still, the well sat in the clearing, Kathy watched intently, and Harry did the same over her shoulder. In a heart-shattering moment of suspense, Harry finally realized (or thought he realized) what was about to happen seconds before it did. 

 

The lip of the well dissolved slightly as one small, white blip, and then another, bloomed from the top of it. A shadow, too, a thick shadow of black hair bloomed vertically from the well, sliding up between the skeletal hands until the girl was able to climb entirely over the side of the well. Her white dress was ragged and water-rotted. Her hands were pallid claws. Unhurriedly, patiently, she began to walk forward, toward the camera.

 

Kathy did not budge from where she sat, but she breathed heavily, unevenly. Harry's heart was pounding in his throat and his mouth felt dry. He and Kathy sat and watched Death walk ever closer.

 

The screen shuddered; the form of Samara, growing larger, also shuddered, as though she weren't quite solid. Water was pooling on the black top of the entertainment center, dripping down from the television screen. Now Samara was so close that only her head and shoulders could be seen.

 

Kathy was back on her feet again - not fully standing, but slowly, warily, pushing herself up from where she knelt on the balls of her feet. Still bent over, her eyes still fixed on the screen, she took one slow step back. Then, Samara's head broke the membrane of the screen. Kathy yelled and jumped backward, not realizing the coffee table was right behind her. She tripped on it, overbalanced, and fell backward across it, shattering the glass around her and screaming in pain. 

 

Meanwhile, Samara pulled herself, slippery and almost slithering, out of the television, over the entertainment center, and onto the floor, where she began to crawl. Harry realized that Samara's skin must have scratched on the entertainment center as she crawled to the floor, leaving the DNA sample that Debra had found just a few days ago.

 

Kathy's head craned up, she caught sight of Samara crawling toward her, and she flipped herself frantically onto her hands and knees. She, too, began to crawl across the wood floor, away from Samara, but her bloody hands kept slipping on the shards of glass. She screamed and winced as more shards pierced her, but she continued moving, panicked and spasmodic, across the floor. 

 

With an electronic shimmer, Samara was suddenly standing, following her struggling prey just as patiently, her hair covering her face like a terrible veil. Kathy had just made it to the hallway; she seemed to cry out with relief at the soft touch of the carpet, but she still grunted with pain. Her hands shaking, she began to pull herself through the hallway with her elbows instead.

 

Soon after she disappeared from Harry's view along with Samara, Harry heard a pitiful voice supplicating, "You're frightening me! Stop it! Why are you doing this? Why are you scaring me like this?"

 

Harry stood up and crept over toward the mouth of the hallway so that he could see what was happening. Before he got there, he heard another silky voice speak over Kathy's bleating: "Shhhhhhhhhhhh..."

 

Something inside of him quieted. He peered around the corner and saw Samara standing, with her back to him, over Kathy, who was on her back again, propped up on her elbows, gazing up at Samara in terror. "Shhhhhhhhhh..." the child's voice admonished gently once again, and then a third time.

 

With each ghostly whisper, the terror on Kathy's face softened until she was left looking merely awed and expectant, staring up at the dead girl before her. Then Samara moved slightly. Harry watched her neck straighten and her head roll up...though he could not see it himself, he knew that she was revealing her face for the first time. 

 

The change of Kathy's expression was alarming. Terror surged back into it - the mouth gaped unnaturally wide in a silent scream - her skin soured in seconds, becoming a faint, moldy green, loose and horribly wrinkled. The nightmare face trembled as life left it, then fell back as Kathy's body dropped fully to the ground, her arms splayed out on either side of her.

 

Harry watched, stunned, as Samara stepped forward, knelt, and straightened up again, holding Kathy's body in her arms like a child's. He stepped back hastily as Samara turned, her face hidden again by her hair, and walked back down the hallway and into the kitchen. The pantry door was already ajar; Samara eased it the rest of the way open and entered with Kathy's body. 

 

A few silent seconds passed in which Harry stared at the open pantry door and imagined Samara posing Kathy's ruined, dead body on the floor in that sad, doll-like pose in which he, Ron and Hermione had found her. 

 

Then something entirely unexpected occurred. When Samara emerged from the pantry, she was not alone: another young girl held her hand and trailed slightly behind her. The girl had curly brown hair down to her chin and wide, wondering eyes...

 

And Samara, herself, had changed. Her dress was no longer drenched and disintegrating, her skin was no longer mottled and rotted, and her hair - while still long and thick - no longer hid her face. And what a strange thing to see her face! It was young, round, and kind, with solemn dark eyes. Harry tried to pinpoint why this was such a revolutionary perspective of her, and he realized that, without having seen her face before, he had almost thought of her as more beast than human.  _Or not really a beast,_  he corrected himself, _but cold and unfeeling, like a dementor_. It was impossible to perceive her that way now as he looked at her brown eyes, which seemed to harbor a wealth of emotion and an ethereal, precocious wisdom.

 

Again, Harry backed out of the way, now slightly into the blood-stained hallway, as the two young girls passed him, hand in hand, walking into the living room. As his eyes followed their path, he noticed that the scene on the television had changed. Now, instead of the well, he saw a tree, a willow, swaying silently in a breeze. There was something familiar about that tree, but Harry could not immediately place it. Around the willow expanded a landscape of grasses, billowing and waving peacefully. Something glinted in the distance...as Harry recognized it as the reflective surface of a lake, he remembered where he had seen these landmarks before: in the picture that Kathy had drawn, in which she and Samara sat beneath a tree by a lake. The picture accompanied by a poem... _Freedom is a place..._

Samara let go of young Kathy's hand, moved forward, and beckoned for her to follow. Then she carefully leaned through the television screen and climbed into the shade of the willow tree. Kathy watched her wonderingly, smiled, and then followed her, struggling a little to clamber up onto the entertainment center before plunging headfirst into the screen. 

 

Harry had a brief glimpse of the girls running toward the lake, heard a brief auditory sample of their laughter and joyous shouts, before the screen was consumed by static once again. The bright, angry lights of the static made him blink, and when he opened his eyes, the screen was black again; there was daylight outside of the window; there was no longer a coffee table or bloodstains on the floor; and Harry was alone on the couch once more. The memory was over.

 

Breathing heavily, Harry stood up and began to pace. Samara did kill Kathy, and Kathy seemed to know it was coming. If she hadn't known it was coming, she would hardly be reproaching Samara for frightening her, as she had done just before dying - she apparently hadn't expected Samara to crawl out of the screen to literally pursue and fetch her; maybe she had imagined sudden death, heart failure, something more passive.

 

But if she had expected death, then why didn't she make a copy of the tape?

 

And then what about the second part of the memory? Samara was clearly trying to show that she was taking Kathy to a sort of heaven, perhaps in an attempt to convince Harry of her good intentions. But whatever her intentions were and wherever she and Kathy were now, he could not excuse killing as a solution to Kathy's problems, he could not...

 

Something in the hallway creaked. Harry paused to listen, and then tiptoed to the entryway of the hall. The last door, the door to Kathy's room, was ajar, light from her windows creeping into the dark hallway. He felt certain that her door had been completely closed when he came in. Impatiently, he strode down the carpeted hall and threw the doorway open so that it bounced off of the wall of her bedroom.

 

The room was empty, but not still. At first Harry couldn't place exactly how an empty room could appear this way, but then he realized that the effect was partially due to the flickering shadows of sunlight, filtered by the palm tree outside of Kathy's window. The shadows danced on the floor. Then there were noises, a soft exhalation of wind, the flappy stirring of papers...the loose parts of the Shins poster above the bed wobbled against the wall.

 

As Harry looked this way and that, seeking the source of the wind, trying to understand whatever message was now being sent to him from beyond the veil, a single paper came dislodged from a folder on Kathy's writing desk - it flew through the air and settled at his feet. The wind, the restlessness of the room, died down. 

 

He bent and picked up the paper. It appeared to be a self-portrait of Kathy, with a melancholy face. In the background, on the right side of her head, was a drawing of her father looking equally sad, holding a wand. On the other side of her head were drawings of people that looked to be her age, early twenties. Harry recognized Chris among them. On some of their faces was a cheerfully oblivious expression - their mouths were open as though they were in mid-speech. On others' faces was an expression of confusion and concern. The Kathy in the foreground faced away from them all, and beneath her face were written the words, "'There's no connection.'"

 

_There's no connection._ She'd written it as though it were a quote, and it did sound familiar; where had he heard that from before? As he combed his memory for this phrase, a whirring sound caught Harry's attention. He looked up and saw that the source of it was a CD player beside Kathy's closet. The digital screen showed that it had settled on a track, and now Harry heard the low, rhythmic introduction of a bass guitar. 

 

"Foals in winter coats

White girls of the north..."

 

An ethereal male voice sang out above the bass guitar and the other instruments that now accompanied him. Another Shins song, "Phantom Limb." Harry recognized it from the radio. Slowly, so as to pay attention to the lyrics, he sat down on the floor. He ordinarily would have preferred to sit on the bed, but it would have felt wrong here, like sitting on a grave.

 

_What are you trying to tell me, Kathy?_ After his experience with the Simon and Garfunkel song, he was waiting for the words that would leap out at him.

 

One of the opening verses seemed like it might have had special meaning for Kathy, regarding how she felt in relation to her magical family:

 

"And they could float above the grass

In circles if they tried

A latent power I know they hide

To keep some hope alive

That a girl like I

Could ever try

Could ever try"

 

But in the end, it was the two choruses that answered his remaining questions.

 

"So we just skirt the hallway sides

A phantom and a fly

Follow the lines

And wonder why

There's no connection"

 

There was the quote he was looking for.  _A Phantom and a fly_...The whole song was written in the first person plural, and the reference to a fly made Harry think of one of the scenes from the videotape; it was the hillside with the burning tree, but in this shot, the tree was not burning, only waving in the breeze. And in the same shot, a fly had walked around the screen. 

 

If Harry had been further away from the television at the time, he would have wondered if the fly had just alighted there from somewhere else in the room, but he had been close enough to see that it was part of the videotape - perhaps, he thought, now that he'd seen Kathy's death, the fly's ambiguous belonging to the videotape was meant to foreshadow the way the video's boundary would again be broached by Samara at the time of the victims' death.

 

But then, if Samara was the fly, then that meant that Kathy was the phantom...

 

"So, when they tap our Monday heads

Two zombies walk in our stead

This town seems hardly worth our time

And we'll no longer memorize or rhyme

Too far along in our crime

Stepping over what now towers to the sky

With no connection"

 

James Mercer, the singer, vocalized for the rest of the song, gently and mournfully. Harry felt tears coming to him again, due to the painful clash he was experiencing between two conflicting emotions - he didn't want the song to end, because it was Kathy speaking to him, and as long as she could speak to him, the tragedy of her death was not so complete - and at the same time, he did not want to accept what she was telling him. He could not accept the fact that all this time, he had not been investigating a homicide, but a suicide.

 

_How could you think_ , Harry asked Kathy in his head as the song started to die out,  _How could you think that this was the only way?_ He lay on the floor and felt a crinkle beneath his head. He lifted his head slightly and extracted the drawing that Kathy had made of herself with her father and friends on either side of her.  _No connection_. 

 

Rightfully angry at her father for not taking her away sooner and for meddling with her memory, she had cut him adrift. And despite the fact that they were working on rebuilding their relationship, even he had said that things were not what they used to be - there was still a sense of estrangement. 

 

At the same time, Kathy could not draw support from her Muggle friends. She never reached out to them for help and they did not know how to reach out to her; and even if they had, she could not have explained to them the entirety of her hurt, how in addition to her trauma, she felt a lingering inadequacy for her lack of magical abilities. They would not have understood her.

 

Unable to turn anywhere, she had encountered the ghost of an empathetic girl who had endured the opposite (but still relatable problem) - possessing magic in a world of fearful, non-magical people. And this girl had beckoned her gently to the void.

 

Harry wanted to be angry at Samara, wanted to blame her for what had happened to Kathy. But how could he blame her for a curse that had been born of her own dying anguish? She had not targeted Kathy; she had carried out the same mechanical (horrifying) actions with Kathy as she had with Chris's friends. Harry liked to think that Samara couldn't help carrying out the terms of her curse, and that if she  _could_  end it for good, she would. At the same time, an uncomfortable part of him, the part of his brain that felt uneasy with the sympathy that he felt for her, wondered if that was really the case, and if she actually enjoyed killing, like Dexter had suspected from the beginning.

 

It really didn't matter at this point. That was the great tragedy of death. It didn't matter whether Samara was a willing killer or not, whether she would have become a killer if she had lived past childhood. It didn't matter when Kathy decided to end her life, whether that was when Chris had approached her with a request for help and easy death in his hands, or whether she had been convinced or seduced by Samara. It did not matter that Kathy and her father were scheduled to have dinner, nor that their relationship was mending. Like an ax, death had felled all of these questions like blooming trees; all Harry could do at this point was blunder between the stunted stumps of them, his heart heavy with grief, and wonder what might have been in a kinder world.

 

Harry wiped his eyes and got to his feet. Kathy's room, the entire house, had settled. He felt certain that it would remain that way from now on, silent and unremarkable, until another family came and filled out its empty spaces with their own joys and hauntings.

 

On his way out of the house, Harry pressed his palm against the black screen of the television. It was smooth, cold, and solid. He hoped, wherever Samara and Kathy were, that they had both found peace, whether in the refuge of each other's understanding or in the shade of a willow, in a heaven beyond hurting. They deserved so much more than that, but that was the best that he could wish for them.


	22. Epilogue: Sharing is Caring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, the very last chapter of this fan-fiction! Thank you to everyone who has stuck with this fan-fiction the entire time, despite my long absences during busy weeks at work and my attempts at being a social creature on the weekends. 
> 
> As always, more than anything, I would love to know your thoughts after reading the whole story, things you liked and things you didn't, what you ate for lunch, whatever's on your mind... :)

From the moment Jill opened her eyes, she knew that something wasn't right. To start, she quickly realized that she  _hadn't_ in fact opened her eyes, because they were clipped open. It didn't hurt at all, but it felt uncomfortable and she couldn't move her eyelids a muscle.

 

In fact, she couldn't move  _any_ muscles. She was sitting in a chair, and her arms were bound tightly to the arms of the chair, her feet to the chair's legs. There was even a thick layer of plastic binding her torso to the chair's back, to prevent her from using any leverage to rise. 

 

Jill became gradually aware of her situation without exerting a visible struggle. It appeared that one of her political opponents had gotten ahold of her at last, and she wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of seeing her in distress. Instead, she took in the details of the room that she was in.

 

Directly in front of her was a television, turned off at the moment. It was hard to make out the rest of the room because it was covered in plastic. This struck her as strange. If one of her political opponents intended to kill her, then they wouldn't need to worry about cleaning up afterwards...only Muggles, appropriately, played dirty when they killed.

 

"Nice to see you awake," a deep, wry voice spoke from the corner. 

 

She turned her head and gazed at her captor, a tall white male with curly, dark hair. The lower half of his face was covered with a mask. She didn't recognize his dark, clever eyes from anywhere. He was dressed in long sleeves, gloves, and a dark apron over his clothes. Part of her swelled with scornful mirth:  _Was this a Muggle? Did a Muggle intend to kill her?_

Immediately, unconsciously, her right hand rustled around on her armrest, trying to navigate down to her pants' pocket, but then the man said, "Looking for this?" He twiddled her wand between his gloved index and middle finger, making it bat back and forth rapidly like a child's baton. 

 

In a low, furious voice, she said, "You give that back to me, you filthy -"

 

Before she could land on a filthy enough descriptor, he had viciously snapped her wand in half. Still smiling pleasantly, he threw the pieces, hard, in opposite directions. Now she was enraged. A wand only channeled magic. She would rip this Muggle - this insect - apart with her mind. She screwed up her face and summoned all of her power - 

 

The man poked her in the forehead. "Stop that,"  he said. "You look constipated." 

 

"WHAT DO YOU WANT?" she shouted, at the same time inwardly panicking that she couldn't do magic. What had happened to her? 

 

"Vengeance," the man breathed, his face an inch from hers. He stepped back and produced a framed photograph of Kathy in which she smiled, her hair caught by an outdoor breeze from the past.

 

Jill glared at the photograph. "Vengeance?" she spat. "I didn't kill the ungrateful little bitch. She ran off and got herself mixed up with the wrong people."

 

The man nodded. "You didn't kill her," he agreed. "You just bullied and tortured her until she lost the will to exist - until she lost the conviction that she was  _worth_ existing. Hold onto your little distinctions as long as you can, Jill Merona, because as far as I'm concerned, the difference between what you did and murder is as small as the width of this pretty blade." 

 

Suddenly, he had a dagger in his hand. He placed the tip of it on the plastic-covered coffee table nearby, then turned it so she was looking at the narrow edge side - almost invisible due to how thin and sharp it was.

 

She watched the blade nervously. Her brain felt sluggish. "You drugged me," she said, partially to buy time and also because the realization had just dawned on her.

 

He nodded, and she could see the mask shift on his face as he smiled. "I wanted to make sure that you couldn't work any hocus pocus on me when you woke up."

 

She settled back in the chair. "So you're going to kill me?" she said resignedly, the fury draining from her veins. "Why do you have my eyes pinned open?"

 

"I'm not going to kill you," the man said matter-of-factly. He set the framed photograph down carefully on the table so that it was facing Jill, and then lay the knife right in front of it. Then he crossed to the television and turned it on to a rustling channel of static. " _I'm_ not going to kill you," he repeated, with a meaningful emphasis, as he walked away from the television. Now he was behind her somewhere, and all she could see was the static-filled screen in front of her.

 

Jill wasn't going to entertain this Muggle by responding to his vulgar teasing and hints, by asking him for more information. She was simply going to wait until her fate revealed itself. 

 

She heard the sound of a door closing behind her and then supposed herself alone in the room. However, just as that supposition occurred to her, she heard a machinal whirring from in front of her. She saw that there was a VCR beneath the television. It had turned on, seemingly by itself. She felt a swoop of disquietude in her belly, at the idea of the machine turning on by itself. It was silly of her, a witch, to feel unnerved by objects behaving as though they were not inanimate; yet, when she did not see another witch or wizard pulling the strings, she felt the same stirrings of terror and chaos, the same that any Muggle would feel, at the uncanny idea that objects may not follow previously-established rules.

 

Now the VCR was straining to play whatever tape it contained. The whirring intensified and the static died suddenly off the screen. Now it was black, but Jill could tell that the television was still on because little lights and blips danced across it occasionally. Then, with a blood-curdling feedback and high keening sound, the screen was suddenly lit up by a rough ring of light in an otherwise dark location. 

 

The jagged way the light danced reminded Jill unpleasantly of the Muggle ultrasound that Aaron had made her get for fun, when she got pregnant for the first time. "There's no magic that lets you see your child before it's born," he had told her excitedly at the time. By the time she left the hospital, she could see why wizards had not invented a magical equivalent of the ultrasound. The experience was uncomfortable and the sight of Kathy on the screen, tiny, disproportionate, and still forming, had repulsed rather than awed her. 

 

The female doctor, misinterpreting her disgust for a first-time mother's nerves, had spoken kindly and condescendingly to her, talking about her own children, cooing with delight for Jill's benefit whenever one of Kathy's arms swung into view. Jill had tried to politely respond to the doctor's queries and exclamations, despite the fact that she felt as though she were trapped in the clutches of a barbaric incompetent.  

 

Wizards, once again, had the better idea. Why interrupt the natural growing process for nothing other than a greedy, impatient look at the developing child? It struck Jill as vaguely perverse and possibly harmful. Indeed, when Kathy turned out to be a Squib, she had wondered if the radiation from the humming machines in that Muggle hospital had ruined her, burned the magic out of her oldest child...

 

The ring of light was replaced with blood and a series of rustic images that Jill did not understand. She thought of the farm that she had grown up on in rural Virginia. As she pondered what the author of this tape might already know about her, she also strained her drugged mind to analyze the magical properties of this tape.

 

Jill was a smart witch. She could tell from the goosebumps on her arms and a certain menace emanating from the images that this was no ordinary videotape. This was a cursed artifact, and judging from what her captor had said (" _I'm_ not going to kill you") it might even contain a death curse. The trick was to determine how to evade death - there was almost always a way to break or evade a death curse, some loophole to exploit. This much she knew from Advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts classes.

 

The tape lingered on its last shot. She couldn't make out what sat in the middle of the clearing. It looked like a pile of bricks. For a moment, when nothing happened, she had a sharp terror that the death curse had already reached its conclusion. That must have been why the man left the room, so that he, too, did not suffer death from watching the tape. She felt an inexplicable fear, a fear that made her breath come in gasps, that something was about to come for her.

 

Indeed, just before the screen dissolved in static once more, she thought that she saw a tiny, fleeting movement just above the distant pile of bricks - perhaps a hand and the top of a dark head appearing? It was too fast to tell, but she knew a profound moment of relief when the video was overtaken by static - she felt a great conviction of being saved, temporarily, from something terrible.

 

That relief was shattered moments later when a telephone that she had not noticed on the table beside her began to ring loudly, a digital ring that was eerily close to a human scream. She knew that the call was for her, and that it was a confirmation of the curse that she had just been infected by. 

 

However, she never got to hear the message because, moments later, something pricked the left side of her neck and unconsciousness took her once more.

 

***

 

Harry, who had been standing in the back of the plastic-covered room, operating the VCR while Dexter stepped out, had removed his Invisibility Cloak; Dexter had cleaned his plastic and restraints from the abandoned house that they were using as a "kill-room" (albeit a very different type of kill room to the one that Dexter was used to); and the two of them, in Dexter's car, had dropped off Jill Merona's unconscious body at her house (Harry had Apparated with her inside so that he could deposit her on her bed).

 

Harry felt a little guilty about passing the curse onto Jill the way they did, without explanation, if only for the daughters that she would leave behind if she died. However, he kept remembering what she had done to Kathy and that appeased his conscience; besides, they had not made it impossible for her to save herself. Dexter had suggested placing a memory charm on her so that she would not remember watching the tape at all; Harry had dismissed that as too underhanded for his comfort. No, she would remember what she had seen, and she would have all of her magical capacity to seek out the tape's origins and puzzle out the mechanism of its death curse, just as he had done. 

 

Now, after Apparating across the country, Harry found himself once again in Washington state. However, now he was on the mainland and Dexter had accompanied him. Dexter stood beside him now, bent over and wheezing from his first experience with the suffocating sensation of Apparition. As Harry waited for Dexter to recover, he examined the mossy wooden sign in front of them, which read "Shelter Mountain Inn." 

 

They had arrived at the mountain resort described by Chris, where his friends had first encountered the videotape. Harry hoped to find one last answer here, as well as deposit one of the videotapes in the place it had been created. The other videotape, his copy, he would turn into the Ministry along with their case write-up.

 

They tramped across the crunching gravel, the constant song of crickets about them, and entered the Main Office of the resort. By luck, the man working at the desk remembered the group of boys who had come a few weeks previously ("I could tell from their accent that they were East Coasters!" he said triumphantly, when they told him that they had come from Miami. They did not have the heart to tell him what had happened to most of them). They paid to stay for the evening in the same room, and he gave them the key to Cabin 12.

 

Like the sign that announced the resort, Cabin 12 was made of dark wood and was significantly overgrown with moss and ivy. If Harry hadn't known that the boys had watched the tape inside that cabin, he would not have expected it to house a television or even electricity. Yet the interior, while still dark and forbidding, did have all of the trappings of a modern building - a telephone, television, and VCR, and a fully-equipped kitchen. 

 

"It even has running water!" Dexter announced sarcastically from the bathroom after flushing.

 

Harry, meanwhile, was walking around the living room of the cabin, trying to detect any sign confirming that he was in the right place. He knelt to examine the television. The screen was solid and nothing seemed irregular about it. He stuck his hand in the VCR but it was currently empty.

 

He felt the cushions of the couch; nothing was hidden underneath them. The table beside the couch held a clunky landline telephone; if it had been any older, it would have been a rotary phone. As Harry picked up the heavy, plastic receiver and traced the cord to the nearest wall, he felt a little chill as he imagined Chris's friends cooped up in this creepy cabin, receiving the whispered curse from a child's voice on this telephone.

 

Across from the door, there was a bookcase of dark oak. Only one of the shelves held books - a Bible, a Farmer's Almanac, and a guest registry. Harry picked this up and thumbed through it eagerly, but only found banal entries from past visitors: 

 

"What a beautiful place for a honeymoon! Thank you!" 

"We couldn't do too much outside because of the rain, but the cabin was very comfortable and the staff very accommodating. ~~Bailey and Geoff" 

"Bigfoot wuz here"

"12-19-00 Al went down to town to get pizza. I hope he's gone a while, that'll give Mom and Aunt Sarah time to get over being offended. God let this vacation end soon."

 

Soon, blank pages were flicking past Harry's fingers and he backtracked until he reached the last populated page. Clean handwriting in the middle of the page spelled the following:

 

"Don't watch any unlabeled VHS tapes you find in this cabin. There's something wrong about this place."

 

There was no date and no signature, but Harry would have bet that the author of the comment was Chris's friend Jeff, the only one who did not laugh off the videotape after watching it, the only one who had survived from the original group of four boys that had visited the cabin.

 

"Wow, take a look at the leaves on this tree," Dexter said. He was standing by the window, his back to the side of the television, holding the curtain back to look out. Red light fell on him and made his skin look bloody.

 

Harry set down the guest book and joined Dexter at the window. His stomach did a back-flip: There, set high on the hill, was a maple tree with blood-red leaves, filtering the sunlight. It was the flaming tree from the videotape. And the tree that Harry had glimpsed in his dream as he had stumbled forward, his knees knocking into the dark stone of the well in front of him.  _Where was it? Where was she?_

"This is it," Harry said, his heart pounding. 

 

Dexter’s eyebrows lifted in amazement. “You mean – this is where she died? How do you know?” he said as he followed Harry outside. 

 

Harry was running, his heart still hammering inside his chest, afraid that he would lose her if it took him too long to figure it out. 

 

“The tree,” he explained distractedly to Dexter as he side-walked around the side of the cabin, keeping the tree in view, trying to picture the vantage point from which he had seen it in his dream. “It was in the videotape, on fire. And in my dream, I saw it – high on the hill, just before Anna suffocated me with the bag.” Dexter walked briskly alongside Harry, very charitably not laughing at his awkward crab-walk. 

 

Harry was almost at the back of the cabin now. He felt that, if he could just move a few steps to the left, he would achieve the vantage point that he had had in his dream. The tree sat solitarily mounted on its hill, almost like a triumphant military flag. For a bizarre moment in which he almost laughed at the thought, Harry imagined the famous American war photograph of a group of marines pitching the American flag onto the hill high above Iwo Jima – with the tree in the flag’s place.

 

Harry recalled from his dream that the tree was uneven, that its tallest point was on its left side. And on either side of it, his view had been unfettered, and the hill had fallen sharply away from it on the left and right. Now, the tallest point was still slightly behind it and a bush could be seen in the foreground. If he just took a few steps to the left – 

 

He stumbled into the cross-hatched wall of the cabin’s crawlspace. Dexter hurried forward and helped him regain his footing, brushing some dirt off of the arm that had collided with the crawlspace wall. 

 

“So wizards can’t walk through walls, huh?” he asked dryly, waiting to see if Harry would smile. He did, so Dexter was then permitted to let out a momentum-gathering laugh, which in turn triggered Harry’s laughter. They enjoyed the absurdity of the moment and then Harry replied, “Actually, I think there is a spell for that, but you’d have to ask Hermione.

 

“I could have sworn that I was more over there when I saw the tree,” Harry continued, pointing through the wall of the cabin. “But the cabin’s in the…”

 

His reproach of the cabin died away. He was remembering what Chris had said, about how his friends had heard grinding noises beneath the floor of the cabin. Harry had assumed, at the time, that the noises had actually been coming from somewhere nearby the cabin, but sounded as though they were underneath the floor due to the fact that the well was underground; he had not considered that, maybe, the cabin was built directly on top of the well.

 

Dexter, who seemed as though he were privy to Harry’s private realization, approached the cross-hatched crawlspace wall with an incredulous expression – not at Harry, but (as Harry would discern from his subsequent words) at the idiocy of the resort developers. 

 

“Why would anyone build a resort cabin on top of – Harry, come here! There’s definitely something in there.” 

 

Harry hurried over to join him. He could definitely see a dark mass that seemed to come to about waist height, in the middle of the earthy floor beneath the cabin. 

 

"Lumos," he breathed. His wand tip alighted, he took hold of Dexter's wrist, and the two of them Apparated a few inches, into the crawlspace. It was dark and grimy down there; Harry could see beady-eyed crickets hopping idly around in one corner, and arbitrary piles of dirt were scattered across the ground. The edges of the crawlspace closest to the exterior looked oddly like reddish checkerboards due to the light from the sunset pouring through the cross-hatched walls.

 

And there, unmistakably and austerely, was the stone well, covered now with a thick lid that Harry did not think he would be able to move by himself if he tried. He and Dexter approached the well and ran their hands over the stones that made up the round wall of it. Experimentally, Harry gave the lid a push. It didn't budge. Dexter walked around until he was right beside Harry and they pushed together. It moved an infinitesimal amount, making a horrible grinding noise in the process.

 

Harry looked up at the dark floorboard above him. He supposed that the living room of the cabin was right above him. The grinding noise of the well lid - was that what the boys had heard on the night that they watched the tape? Had Samara, perhaps, climbed out of the well and stood underneath them as they watched the videotape that would take most of their lives?

 

He heard a dark rumbling, seemingly from beneath him. A shiver of fear took him at the idea of Samara scrambling, spider-like, up the walls of the well. "Let's close it up, for now," he murmured to Dexter. "We'll report it in a bit, but now let's take care of the tape." 

 

They walked to the other side of the well and, with a great effort, pushed the lid back so that it completely covered the lip of the well again. Harry could have sworn that he heard a small rustling noise, as though someone hid just within the belly of the well, scratching at the lid from the inside. However, Harry did not mention this impression to Dexter. He merely reached out his hand again, and when Dexter took it, they Apparated upward and found themselves standing in the living room, on either side of the side table with the telephone. 

 

Harry looked at the telephone and then down at the floor. "Appropriate placement for this telephone," he said grimly. 

 

Dexter nodded. "Where are you going to put the tape?" 

 

Harry looked around the room. He thought it appropriate to return the tape (the original one that he had watched) to the place of its origin. He wasn't sure why; it was more of a ceremonial gesture than anything else, but he supposed that it also might prevent the curse from spreading further, as long as he used the full extent of his magical prowess to hide it.

 

He found just the place. The bottom shelf of the bookshelf was empty, and Harry thought it would be the perfect place to create a hidden, enchanted compartment in which to house the tape. As Dexter watched, he moved his wand in a rectangle over the bottom shelf - a fiery outline, as though etched into the wood, appeared. Slowly and gently, Harry pulled the tip of his wand upward, and the bottom of the fiery rectangle lifted up also, as though there was a hidden hinge in the wood. To his amazement, Dexter saw that there was now a compartment within the shelf, with enough space to place the tape there.

 

Harry placed the tape that had killed Kathy in the compartment, closed the wooden lid that he had just created over it, and waved his wand over it once more so that the fiery rectangle disappeared. Now, there was no trace that there was a hidden compartment within the shelf. Dexter ran his fingers over the smooth shelf, trying to find a line or break in the wood, but could find none. 

 

"That's a good hiding place on a superficial level," Harry said. "But if a Muggle breaks this shelf, or if Jill comes here, trying to sniff out the videotape, it would be easy enough to come across it. We need an extra, more subtle layer of enchantment to ensure that this tape is never found..." Harry's voice trailed off and he continued to stare at the shelf, though not seeing it.

 

Dexter was watching his pensive face with a look of concern. "Everything OK, Harry?"

 

Harry was roused from his reverie. "Yes," he told Dexter, smiling. He felt silly for a brief moment, imagining someone walking into the cabin and finding them sitting like children, criss-cross-applesauce, in front of the bookshelf. He continued speaking slowly, trying to articulate the dark thought that had just overshadowed his plan like a rain-cloud. "It's just...the spell that I'm about to do....is the spell that failed to save my parents." 

 

Dexter's brow furrowed. "Then why would you use that spell?"

 

"It didn't fail because of something wrong with the magic," Harry waved his hand. "The magic is perfect, apart from the fact that it depends on human trustworthiness. My parents, when this spell was performed for them, put their faith in the wrong man." 

 

As Harry reflected on the repercussions of Peter Pettigrew's treachery, on the gaping hole that he had left in Harry's life, Dexter reached out a hand to grip his shoulder. It was a tight grip, the kind of grasp that almost hurt, but on purpose, because sometimes this kind of physical almost-hurting was the only defense against the wild grief that raked your insides. It was almost as though the near-pain of Dexter's grip kept Harry's thoughts outside his body, instead of in his mind, where he mourned every year that he grew older than his parents had been when they had died. Harry thought of Aaron Merona's mother in church, almost brutally pulling her son's head down onto her wizened shoulder, and Harry leaned into Dexter's grip, until their foreheads and the bridges of their noses were touching.

 

He lifted his head slowly, his eyes squeezed closed against hot tears, and kissed Dexter's lips. A nighttime rain began to patter on the cabin roof. 

 

"I trust you just as much as Ron and Hermione," Harry told Dexter. "Do you think...How would you feel about being the Secret-Keeper for the location of this videotape?" He tapped the smooth wood of the bookshelf's lower shelf.

 

"Me?" said Dexter, looking a little nervous and overwhelmed. "Be the person who has the spell on them? Are you sure?"

 

"Yes," said Harry. "If Jill comes looking for the tape, she won't expect for a Muggle to be the Secret-Keeper. I can keep you safe until Jill's 7 days are past. And longer than that," he added, flirtatiously hopeful.

 

Dexter relaxed. "All right," he said. "How does it work?" 

 

Harry took the guest book back down from the middle shelf, ripped out a page, and handed the paper and a pen to Dexter. "Write this down," he said. " _The cursed videotape is located in a hidden compartment in the bottom of the bookcase in Cabin 12 of Shelter Mountain Inn._ "

 

Once Dexter had finished writing, Harry asked him if he was ready. Dexter nodded. 

 

Harry gave a few additional instructions and then whispered, "Fidelius," waving his wand in a circular motion between the piece of paper and Dexter.

 

Dexter, as instructed, read what he had written aloud: " _The cursed videotape is located in a hidden compartment in the bottom of the bookcase in Cabin 12 of Shelter Mountain Inn._ "

 

As Dexter read, Harry continued his circular wand motion. When he got to the end of the line, the words on the paper glowed red and Dexter's eyes grew a little wide as his lips were pressed closed by the spell - Harry had explained that this would happen as the spell took effect. Soon, the red glow expanded all across the paper and it burst into flames. It disintegrated in the air, leaving no ashes on the floor. Dexter's lips popped apart again as the spell reached completion. 

 

"Now," Harry explained, "Even if Jill came in here with an ax and chopped down this bookshelf into bits and pieces, she would not be able to find the videotape. No one can find it unless you or I tell them."

 

"And I won't," said Dexter.

 

"I know." Harry took his hand. "Let's go home." 

 

As they left the cabin and stepped into the mountain-fresh air, surrounded by a chorus of crickets, Dexter said, "When you said that you could protect me for Jill's seven days..."

 

"And longer," Harry added in a sing-song voice.

 

"And longer," Dexter agreed. "When you said that, did you mean that you were going to put some protective spell on me, or..."

 

Harry could tell that Dexter did not want to presume, did not want to be rude and invite himself back to England with Harry. Harry inwardly reflected how funny it was for a self-professed, cold-blooded killer to be so courteous.

 

"I meant that you could come stay with me, if you wanted," Harry said, relieving Dexter of the need to think of something else that Harry could have meant.

 

"Oh!" said Dexter, pretending to be surprised. "Really? Are you sure I wouldn't be a bother, or a burden, or anything?"

 

"Not at all," Harry said easily. He felt a swoon of deja-vu. He looked up at the moon that was rising over the trees - it was not full, like it had been on the night when his godfather had cautiously offered for Harry to come live with him. Harry remembered how his heart had exploded with joy at the thought of living with his parents' best friend. He tried to quell the bitter waves of regret that always trailed close behind thoughts of Sirius. Now, offering for Dexter to come stay with him for an undefined period of time, Harry felt a little like he was on the other side of that conversation with Sirius, and that Dexter was playing his original part.

 

As they walked toward the office, they passed near the base of the hill. The maple tree on top looked like a hunched specter in the fallen night, robbed of its vibrant colors.

 

"Deb's going to be jealous," Harry heard the grin in Dexter's voice. Dexter told Harry that it had been a long time since he'd been on a proper vacation. He'd been too busy with work and his "side-projects." 

 

"Well, you know what they say," Harry said. "'All work and no play.'"

 

Dexter laughed as they walked into the main office. The manager, who had been in the back room watching TV, seemed legitimately sad to see them go, more for the lost company than their business. Harry figured it must be lonely to be the only person staffing the desk in an out-of-the-way place like this. 

 

They had decided earlier that they would not report the body to him. They would wait until they had checked out, and then make an anonymous call to the police so as not to attract too much attention back to themselves. Indeed, Harry took care to perform a quick Oblivation charm on the manager before leaving the office, so he would not remember that they had stayed there. Then, Harry cast another spell that erased their penned-in names from the manager's check-in book.

 

Dexter was now quite accustomed to Side-Along-Apparition. When they arrived back in Harry's hotel room, he recovered just as quickly as Harry. Harry was not at all surprised to find Hermione and Ron still awake, waiting to hear what had happened. Harry and Dexter filled them in on the passing of the curse onto Jill (Hermione ordinarily would not have approved of this, but her negative view of Prodding and the extremes to which Jill had taken it had ultimately reconciled her to the idea), the disposal of the tape, and the discovery of the well. 

 

"Sounds like we can write up the case!" Hermione said. She eagerly pulled out her laptop and opened it, ready to get to work. 

 

"Remember," Harry put his hand on hers cautiously. "We need to be careful how we write this. We can't let anyone know that we showed Jill the tape."

 

Hermione leaned against her pillows, a thoughtful expression on her face. "We could omit that you watched it at all..."

 

"But Dad, McGonagall, and Kingsley all know he saw it," Ron reminded her.

 

Hermione wrung her hands, looking down at her computer like a chess player whose king was backed into a corner.

 

"So why can't you tell the truth?" Dexter asked.

 

Harry explained patiently, "She sits on the International Confederation of Wizards. The fact that Kathy is her daughter and that someone might have been targeting her politically is literally the reason why  _we_ were sent to investigate this, rather than someone local." 

 

"Ah," said Dexter, dropping into an armchair, his eyes open wide and blank in a stumped expression. 

 

They could all hear a children's television program playing in the room next door, a chorus of shrill voices muffled by the wall.

 

"What if," Ron spoke tentatively, "We say that I watched it, today? Then we turn the tape over to the Ministry. They'll have someone at the Department of Mysteries do experiments on it. Then, when I'm alive in 7 days, we can say that they were able to break the curse."

 

"Yeah," said Harry, excited. "That would work. The Department of Mysteries will be pleased with themselves, so pleased that nobody will consider the possibility that you  _didn't_ actually watch the tape. Then they'll lock it away so that no one else gets hurt."

 

Hermione looked skeptical. "What if they don't make any changes to the tape, though? What if we come back and tell them that they broke the curse and they're like, 'We haven't gotten the chance to apply any curse-breaking spells to this yet'?"

 

"They'd better have tried to break it by then!" Ron said indignantly, as though his life were actually on the line, "They couldn't just putter around until I kicked the bucket!"

 

Hermione nodded toward Ron in acknowledgement, not looking entirely convinced.

 

"What about your mom, Harry?" Dexter spoke suddenly, quietly, from his armchair in the corner. Everyone looked at him intently. Dexter was leaning forward in his chair, inspiration seeming to fill out his expression like air in an inflated balloon. "What was it you said to me, a few nights ago? Something about old magic, how because your mom died to save you, people have to get creative when they try to kill you?"

 

Harry nodded and Dexter looked even more excited. "We could say that you didn't show the tape to anyone. Instead, you watched it a few days ago, and you haven't done anything else with it since then because you're sure that Samara won't be able to get past your mom's protection. In fact," Dexter added. "Your mom did the exact opposite of what her mom did. Samara's mom killed her, and yours died to keep you alive...what if the two canceled each other out?" 

 

Dexter's argument was so convincing that Harry was starting to wonder if he really would have lived if he had not copied the tape and shown it to Jill. "Dexter, you are brilliant," said Harry. The others agreed and Hermione complimented Dexter on his natural intuition into the rules of deep magic. She began to type up the details of the case.

 

"What happens, though, when they find Jill dead in a week?" Ron said.

 

" _If_ she dies," Harry corrected him. Then he addressed Hermione. "We'll make it clear in the report that Samara had it out for Jill, and that she was pointing toward her during the whole investigation. Samara somehow had the power to create the first tape from beyond the grave...who's to say that she couldn't have created a second one, and specifically targeted Jill?" 

 

Hermione nodded and then asked, "What if she puts out a report looking for Dexter? She saw the top half of his face, right?"

 

"I have a feeling that Jill is too proud to put out a report that  _anyone_ got the better of her, much less a Muggle," Harry smirked.

 

"Still," said Hermione, concerned. "I think you should keep Dexter well and hidden for a few weeks until all of this blows over." 

 

They all agreed and Hermione continued to tap away at her keyboard. Harry and Dexter left the hotel to make the call to the Washington police, and also so that Dexter could pack his things for the journey to England tomorrow. "I've already texted Deb to let her know that I'll be gone from work for a few weeks," Dexter explained to Harry as they walked toward a payphone. "She didn't ask any questions, she's just going put in for the time on my behalf. I think she knows how much I need a vacation."

 

Harry put a location-masking spell on the payphone, told the police that he could offer them a tip about the location of a body, gave them the details, and hung up when he felt sure that they had written everything down. They had tried to ask him identifying questions, but he had simply ignored them.

 

In Dexter's apartment, Harry put protective spells all around the door and windows, making it nearly impossible for Jill or any other wizard to find the place. Meanwhile, Dexter walked from room to room, throwing random piles of clothing and toiletries into a suitcase that he had dragged into the living room. Once he had piled everything he wanted in there, he then sat down on the floor and began to fold and organize it neatly. 

 

"Here, let me help," said Harry, approaching the suitcase. With a wave of his wand, the collared shirts were all folded into neat squares, the shoes were stacked toe to heel, and matching socks were bundled together in the most space-efficient way. 

 

"I packed a lot of long-sleeved stuff," Dexter said as they brushed their teeth together in his spacious master bathroom. "It  _is_ quite a bit colder in England, right?" 

 

Harry spat out his minty mouthful of froth. "Yeah, especially compared to here. Rainier, too."

 

Since it was quite late, they had decided that Harry would stay the night there with Dexter (since the hotel would have been crowded with all four of them anyway). Then in the morning, they would all meet up for breakfast and Apparate back to England together.

 

As they crawled into bed beneath Dexter's fluffy down blanket, Harry looked forward to bringing Dexter to his home, like a bubbly toddler excited to show a toy to a new acquaintance. His mind brimmed with idle contentment as he imagined giving Dexter the room-to-room tour, introducing him to all of the magical apparatuses, sitting down to dinner across from him tomorrow night...He would have to clean off his dining room table, as the other side of it (where Ginny had sat) was now cluttered with mail, work papers, and jackets and cloaks that he had not bothered to hang back up in the closet.

 

"Harry?" 

 

With a rustle, Harry turned on his side to look at Dexter. He could see his dark, clever eyes peering back at him. 

 

"What'll happen when I have to come back to work? Will we still...see each other?"

 

"Course we will," said Harry. "I can Apparate, so I can come round your place or pick you up every night of the week if you want."

 

Dexter closed his eyes and exhaled, settling more comfortably into the bed. "Good," he said. "That'll be nice. We'll have to come up with a way to communicate, in case I happen to be on a late-night errand," he turned on his back and smiled grimly. "But the funny thing is that, lately, when I've been around you, I haven't even  _felt_ the need to kill. It's like, the rest of me feels so present and alive that I don't even notice it, like it's gone dormant..."

 

"You make me feel more alive, too." Harry murmured sleepily, scooting closer to Dexter and putting his arm around his chest. Both were lulled to sleep by the gentle sound of cars rushing by on the parkway outside, which came to them like waves.

 

Harry woke before Dexter the next morning. It was the kind of pleasant, gradual awakening you feel when you've had a full night of sleep and the sun has just started to filter into the room and kiss your eyes. 

 

As Harry's sleepy gaze fell on Dexter (still on his back, but now with an arm thrown up above his head), he also noticed that the arm that he had cast over Dexter's chest the previous evening no longer bore red burns in the shape of little hands.

 


End file.
